Biology – Page 144

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You Otter Hair How Otters Keep Warm

August 22, 2005

While on a sabbatical exploring Isle Royale National Park, John Weisel (U of Pennsylvania) decided to collect hair from various mammals. He found otter fur to be particularly interesting, says a press release from U of Penn Health System. Since otters don’t have a layer of fat, he wondered, how do they keep warm in […]

Terrestrial Zoology

From Emperors to Monarchs….

August 19, 2005

If lion is king, and penguin is emperor, who would have thought a dainty insect would be monarch? EurekAlert posted a story earlier this month too good to pass up: monarch butterflies follow the light – ultraviolet light – to their breeding grounds. Scientists at Hebrew University, working with monarchs in a specially-designed flight simulator […]

Birds

Do Emperor Penguins Know the Meaning of True Love?

August 19, 2005

The nature film sensation March of the Penguins is capturing the public imagination because of its portrayal of emperor penguins in almost anthropomorphic visions. Strutting upright in their feathery tuxedos, these Antarctic seabirds seem almost human: they love, they walk, they sacrifice, they grieve over the loss of a chick, they endure hardship bravely, they […]

Fossils

Fossil Brachiopod Shows Soft Part Details

August 18, 2005

American and British paleontologists described in Nature1 the discovery of nearly complete brachiopods with calcified soft parts intact. They exhibited intricate details never before seen in fossils of these organisms, sometimes called lamp shells. Brachiopods, a type of marine animal that attached itself to the sea floor with a pedicle or stalk, were very abundant […]

Genetics

What Do You Get When You Cross a Lion with a Tiger?

August 10, 2005

A liger, that’s what. No kidding: you get a big cat with a mane and faint stripes that likes to play in the water. National Geographic News has a special article, with photos, about ligers. This is offered without much comment, just for those who want to learn about something unusual in the animal kingdom, […]

Dumb Ideas

Do Butterflies Evolve Via Team Stripes?

July 25, 2005

A BBC News story is claiming that butterflies split into competing teams when differences in their wing patterns emerge. Based on a paper in Nature,1 this is supposed to be an example of a rarely-observed mechanism for speciation, called reinforcement: in this case, “These wing colours apparently evolved as a sort of ‘team strip’, allowing […]

Birds

Lung Link to Dinos and Birds Disputed

July 21, 2005

Carl Wieland at AIG has given a creationist response to the widely-publicized claim last week that dinosaurs breathed like birds (see Live Science and News@Nature). Creationists are good for evolutionists. Otherwise, who would keep their rampant speculations in check? If evolutionists were really interested in truth, they would welcome debate over interpretations of evidence from […]

Mammals

Sharks and Beavers Inspire Humans

July 16, 2005

Animals never cease to amaze us with their clever solutions to problems that plague human technology. EurekAlert told of work being done by the Society for Experimental Biology to emulate shark skin as a self-cleaning surface for boats; National Geographic News has pictures of the new product, and a comparison with shark skin. The navy […]

Intelligent Design

Sponge Bobs Upward in Respect

July 8, 2005

The simplest group of multicellular animals, the sponges, is not so simple. “Researchers have long regarded sponges as the most primitive form of animal life,” wrote Helen Pilcher in Nature;1 “At first glance, sponges seem simple. They have no gut, no brain, no obvious front or back, left or right. Adults pump water through a […]

Fossils

Horse Evolution Tale Gets Hairier

June 30, 2005

If you thought the story of horse evolution was well understood as a poster child of Darwinism at work, consider what Weinstock et al. say in a preprint in PLoS Biology:1 The rich fossil record of horses has made them a classic example of evolutionary processes. However, while the overall picture of equid evolution is […]

Human Body

Nose Knows More than Math Pros Suppose

June 27, 2005

The aroma of coffee, of a steak, of cherries – these smells are all composed of dozens if not hundreds of separate molecules, yet our brains immediately recognize them each as a coherent whole. How does the nose and the brain process all this information? This is the subject of an article in the Caltech […]

Cell Biology

Reverse-Engineering Biological Networks Challenges Caltech Scientists

June 25, 2005

Evolutionists love to quote Dobzhansky saying, “Nothing in biology makes sense apart from evolution.” An article in the current issue of Caltech’s magazine Engineering and Science,1 however, might change that proverb to, “Nothing in biology makes sense apart from information theory and systems engineering.” The article makes no mention of evolution, but rather looks at […]

Birds

Wind Tunnel Experiments Reveal Dynamics of Hummingbird Flight

June 24, 2005

Scientists have found out that hummingbirds and insects don’t hover in the same way. Insects support 50% of their weight on both up and down strokes, but hummingbirds support 75% on the downstroke and 25% on the upstroke. This was published in Nature this week,1 and summarized on Science Daily. The latter article […]

Mammals

Lions Guard Kidnap Victim in Ethiopia

June 22, 2005

Some news stories make you wonder about divine providence. Netscape News reported a story of lions that rescued a kidnapped Ethiopian girl who was being beaten by seven men trying to force her to marry one of them. In Ethiopia, men will often beat and rape a woman who resists a forced marriage; up to […]

Botany

Roses Are Red, Darwinists Are Blue

June 9, 2005

Roses have a special pigment molecule, a particular form of anthocyanin, responsible for all the rich red-to-blue shades in the petals that delight gardeners and attract pollinating insects. This molecule is different from the pigments in every other flowering plant; it is glycosylated at two positions instead of one.2 A single enzyme does the job […]

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