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Honeybees Fly with Mental Maps
February 15, 2005
You can tell a honeybee to get lost, but it can’t.  You can even take it off its flight path, but it will find its way back.  Scientists writing in PNAS1 this week described experiments by a European team that wanted to test their navigating abilities.  They marked bees at feeding stations, then took them […]
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Lichens: Two Designs Are Better than One
February 15, 2005
A lichen is a symbiotic organism comprised of an alga and a fungus.  PNAS1 reported a study that showed that “antioxidant and photoprotective mechanisms in the lichen Cladonia vulcani are more effective by orders of magnitude than those of its isolated partners” (emphasis added in all quotes).  Kranner et al. found: Without the fungal contact, […]
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Is Science Acting Insane? AAAS President Bemoans Constraints of Societal Ethics, Advocates Dipl
February 11, 2005
“…insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.”   Alan I. Leshner, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, reminds readers of Science1 of this proverb in order to help them face the fact that ignoring the public’s values, or protesting against them, will not allow […]
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Loss of Mangrove Forests Exacerbated Tsunami Damage
February 10, 2005
Many seashores have a natural defense against the onslaught of a tsunami: the mangrove forest.  Dense thickets of these trees that tolerate salt water and line the coasts of many subtropical islands and continents can absorb much of the energy of killer waves.  It is entirely plausible that the enormity of the human death toll […]
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Age Estimate for Oldest Glacier Revised Way Down
February 2, 2005
Deposits from Antarctic glacial ice thought to be 8.1 million years old have been re-dated at not more than 310,000 years old, and maybe as little as 43,000, reports a team writing in the Feb. issue of Geology.1  Ng (MIT), Hallet, Sletten and Stone (U. of Washington) analyzed cosmogenic helium-3 and calculated the rate of […]
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Genes Evolving Downward
February 2, 2005
Those assuming the evolution of eukaryotic genomes has progressed upward in complexity may find the following abstract from PNAS1 startling: We use the pattern of intron conservation in 684 groups of orthologs from seven fully sequenced eukaryotic genomes to provide maximum likelihood estimates of the number of introns present in the same orthologs in various […]
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Venus Flytrap Is Snappy-Fast
January 27, 2005
One tenth of a second is all the time the fly gets.  The traps of the Venus flytrap, an insectivorous plant Charles Darwin called “one of the most wonderful in the world,” somehow responds to stimuli quickly without muscles.  The entire mechanism is still largely unknown.  A team of French, UK and American scientists set […]
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How To Make Instant Petrified Wood
January 24, 2005
“Want to petrify wood without waiting a few million years?  Try this,” EurekAlert teases.  The recipe: pick up some pine or poplar wood chips from your local lumber store, soak them in an acid bath for two days, then soak them in silica solution for two more.  Air dry, then put into argon-filled furnace at […]
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Spinach Leaf: “One of Nature’s supreme examples of nanoscale engineering”
January 24, 2005
Under the peaceful summer sun, plants deal with a life-or-death situation: too much sun.  Those of us with legs can take cover, but a poor spinach plant out in the furrow must deal with the excess energy or die.  Since it usually doesn’t die, what’s its secret?  A process called photosynthetic feedback de-excitation quenching, if […]
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Ribosome Unties the Messenger-RNA Gordian Knot
January 19, 2005
Cells needing to translate their DNA into proteins have a problem.  The messenger RNAs, the molecules that carry the genetic code from the nucleus to the translating machine called the ribosome, get tied up in knots.  How does the ribosome untie them before they can begin translating?  Takyar et al., writing in Cell,1 explored this […]
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Simple Darwinian Theories Have to Be Abandoned
January 17, 2005
Mutate one gene and a cascade of changes can result.  This effect is called pleiotropy (see 10/01/2003 entry).  According to an article by Stephen Strauss reporting for the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail, “The emerging richness of pleiotropy means that any simple Darwinian notion of what is going on during natural selection has to be […]
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DNA Translators Cannot Tolerate Editor Layoffs
January 12, 2005
We’ve explained elsewhere about the family of molecular machines called aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (see 05/26/2004 entry and its embedded links).  Their job is to associate each word of DNA code (codon) with its corresponding piece of a protein (amino acid).  In a very real sense, they translate the DNA code into the protein code.  One amazing […]
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Gecko Has Self-Cleaning Feet
January 4, 2005
Imagine self-cleaning, reusable tape.  No matter where you stick it, you can remove it and stick it on another surface, no matter how dirty, and it always acts like new.  The tokay gecko has achieved such a feat on its feet, according to a physicist and a biologist from Lewis and Clark College, Oregon, publishing […]
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Theologians Wrestle with God’s Role in Disasters
January 3, 2005
As international rescue efforts accelerate in the aftermath of last week’s tsunamis in Asia (see Caltech for the geological story, and Nature News for the earthquake’s affect on Earth’s rotation), commentators and theologians are beginning to ask the “why?” questions.  The liberal Archbishop of Canterbury is doubting the existence of God, according to the UK […]
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Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week
January 1, 2005
The authors of the second paper in the previous story compared endosymbiosis to mergers of companies, apparently unaware they were comparing undirected natural processes with intelligently planned decisions by human minds: Imagine you are running a successful small business converting carbon dioxide into sugar.  Suddenly, you are taken over by a bigger company.  They commandeer […]
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