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Category: Biology

Migratory bird flies non-stop over 7,500 miles from Alaska to New Zealand

Migratory bird flies non-stop over 7,500 miles from Alaska to New Zealand

The Guardian reports: A bird said to have the aerodynamic build of a “jet fighter” has been tracked flying more than 12,000km (7,500 miles) from Alaska to New Zealand, setting a new world record for avian non-stop flight. The bar-tailed godwit set off from south-west Alaska on 16 September and arrived in a bay near Auckland 11 days later, having flown at speeds of up to 55mph. The male bird, known as 4BBRW in reference to the blue, blue, red…

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The blueprint for life, neatly folded

The blueprint for life, neatly folded

By Ivan Amato, Knowable Magazine, October 10, 2020 Squinting through his microscope at salamander cells, late-nineteenth-century biologist Walther Flemming spotted a curious substance deep inside the cells’ nuclei that selectively soaked up the stain he was using. The stuff looked like a skein of wool — until, that is, a cell underwent division. Then the skein separated into fatter, discrete threads: the chromosomes, Greek for “color bodies.” Flemming’s scientific descendants are still squinting, but with ever more powerful molecular, imaging…

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Humans are all more closely related than we commonly think

Humans are all more closely related than we commonly think

Scott Hershberger writes: The late esteemed English actor Christopher Lee traced his ancestry directly to Charlemagne. In 2010 Lee released a symphonic metal album paying homage to the first Holy Roman emperor—but his enthusiasm may have been a tad excessive. After all, says geneticist Adam Rutherford, “literally everyone” with European ancestry is directly descended from Charlemagne. The family tree of humanity is much more interconnected than we tend to think. “We’re culturally bound and psychologically conditioned to not think about…

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The fear of being eaten shapes brains, behavior, and entire ecosystems

The fear of being eaten shapes brains, behavior, and entire ecosystems

Lesley Evans Ogden writes: As high tide inundates the muddy shallows of the Fraser river delta in British Columbia, what looks like a swarm of mosquitoes quivers in the air above. Upon closer inspection, the flitting mass turns out to be a flock of small shorebirds. The grey-brown wings and white chests of several thousand Pacific dunlins move in synchrony, undulating low over the water, then rising up like a rippling wave, sometimes for hours on end. Staying aloft like…

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The molecular biologist, Jacques Monod, saw chance as one of the ‘secrets of life’

The molecular biologist, Jacques Monod, saw chance as one of the ‘secrets of life’

Sean B. Carroll writes: Jacques Monod arrived in Paris to some dreadful news. On June 5, 1944, four years into the German occupation of France during World War II, he was supposed to meet with fellow leaders in the French Resistance when his assistant, Geneviève Noufflard, told him that several commanders within the greater Paris region had just been caught by the Gestapo. Monod was pretty sure that at least one of those arrested knew about the rendezvous he was…

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Mysterious circles in the desert explained by the Turing pattern

Mysterious circles in the desert explained by the Turing pattern

Science Alert reports: It was 1952, and Alan Turing was about to reshape humanity’s understanding of biology. In a landmark paper, the English mathematician introduced what became known as the Turing pattern – the notion that the dynamics of certain uniform systems could give rise to stable patterns when disturbed. Such ‘order from disturbance’ has become the theoretical basis for all sorts of strange, repeated motifs seen in the natural world. It was a good theory. So good, in fact,…

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First compelling evidence of organisms that eat viruses as a food source

First compelling evidence of organisms that eat viruses as a food source

Science Alert reports: Eat or be eaten: It’s an edict of Mother Nature that connects every corner of the biosphere in a sprawling web of producers, consumers, detritivores, and scavengers. Every corner but one, it seems. Just what the hell dines on viruses? Scientists may have just discovered the answer. Given the fact that the viral biomass dusting our landscape, drifting through the atmosphere, and floating in our oceans could easily add up to tens of millions of tonnes of…

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Ancient microbial life used arsenic to thrive in a world without oxygen

Ancient microbial life used arsenic to thrive in a world without oxygen

Purple microbial mats offer clues to how ancient life functioned. Pieter Visscher, CC BY-ND By Pieter Visscher, University of Connecticut; Brendan Paul Burns, UNSW, and Kimberley L. Gallagher, Quinnipiac University Billions of years ago, life on Earth was mostly just large slimy mats of microbes living in shallow water. Sometimes, these microbial communities made carbonate minerals that over many years cemented together to become layered limestone rocks called stromatolites. They are the oldest evidence of life on Earth. But the…

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Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

Sharon Begley writes: Whether crows, ravens, and other “corvids” are making multipart tools like hooked sticks to reach grubs, solving geometry puzzles made famous by Aesop, or nudging a clueless hedgehog across a highway before it becomes roadkill, they have long impressed scientists with their intelligence and creativity. Now the birds can add one more feather to their brainiac claims: Research unveiled on Thursday in Science finds that crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their…

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Time for humans to learn what other animals are saying

Time for humans to learn what other animals are saying

Michelle Nijhuis writes: Bryony Lavery’s 2018 play Slime revolves around seven young interns at the Third Annual Slime Crisis Conference, which takes place at an unspecified time in a not-too-distant future. It is a multispecies gathering, convened in response to a toxic slime that is taking over the world’s oceans. The interns’ job is to interpret the squawks, squeaks, and groans of the cormorants, seals, guillemots, toads, and other animals in attendance, and to encourage all species to participate in…

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‘Zombie’ microbes redefine life’s energy limits

‘Zombie’ microbes redefine life’s energy limits

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: Energy drives the planet; it’s the currency that all living things use to grow, develop and function. But just how little energy do cells need to get by? Sediment-dwelling microbes below the seafloor — which may outnumber the microbial cells found in the oceans themselves — are providing some surprising answers. The organisms not only challenge what scientists thought they knew about life’s energy needs, but hint at new ways of defining what life is and where…

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Mitochondria may hold keys to anxiety and mental health

Mitochondria may hold keys to anxiety and mental health

Elizabeth Landau writes: Carmen Sandi recalls the skepticism she faced at first. A behavioral neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, she had followed a hunch that something going on inside critical neural circuits could explain anxious behavior, something beyond brain cells and the synaptic connections between them. The experiments she began in 2013 showed that neurons involved in anxiety-related behaviors showed abnormalities: Their mitochondria, the organelles often described as cellular power plants, didn’t work well —…

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Grooming behavior between dairy cows reveals complex social network

Grooming behavior between dairy cows reveals complex social network

By Peter Rejcek, Frontiers Science News, August 4, 2020 Like humans, cattle are social creatures with complex relationships that change as group dynamics evolve. A study published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science offered new insights into the social networking behavior of dairy cows, building on a body of research that could someday help reshape farm management practices to create healthier living environments for the animals. A team of Chilean and US scientists spent 30 days observing a small herd of…

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Why plants are green

Why plants are green

Rodrigo Pérez Ortega writes: From large trees in the Amazon jungle to houseplants to seaweed in the ocean, green is the color that reigns over the plant kingdom. Why green, and not blue or magenta or gray? The simple answer is that although plants absorb almost all the photons in the red and blue regions of the light spectrum, they absorb only about 90% of the green photons. If they absorbed more, they would look black to our eyes. Plants…

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In social insects, researchers find hints for controlling disease

In social insects, researchers find hints for controlling disease

By Michael Schulson, July 22, 2020 Given that she infects ant colonies with deadly pathogens and then studies how they respond, one might say that Nathalie Stroeymeyt, a senior lecturer in the school of biological sciences at the University of Bristol in the U.K., specializes in miniature pandemics. The tables turned on her, however, in March: Covid-19 swept through Britain, and Stroeymeyt was shut out of her ant epidemiology lab. The high-performance computers she uses to track ant behavior sat…

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Ancient microbial arms race sharpened our immune system — but also left us vulnerable

Ancient microbial arms race sharpened our immune system — but also left us vulnerable

Ann Gibbons writes: At a recent symposium on the evolution of infectious diseases, University of California, San Diego (UCSD), pathologist Nissi Varki noted that humans suffer from a long list of deadly diseases—including typhoid fever, cholera, mumps, whooping cough, measles, smallpox, polio, and gonorrhea—that don’t afflict apes and most other mammals. All of those pathogens follow the same well-trodden pathway to break into our cells: They manipulate sugar molecules called sialic acids. Hundreds of millions of these sugars stud the…

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