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Category: Biology

What a newfound kingdom means for the tree of life

What a newfound kingdom means for the tree of life

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Jonathan Lambert writes: The tree of life just got another major branch. Researchers recently found a certain rare and mysterious microbe called a hemimastigote in a clump of Nova Scotian soil. Their subsequent analysis of its DNA revealed that it was neither animal, plant, fungus nor any recognized type of protozoan — that it in fact fell far outside any of the known large categories for classifying complex forms of life (eukaryotes). Instead, this flagella-waving oddball stands as the first…

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‘Self-aware’ fish raises questions about mirror test

‘Self-aware’ fish raises questions about mirror test

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Elizabeth Preston writes: A little blue-and-black fish swims up to a mirror. It maneuvers its body vertically to reflect its belly, along with a brown mark that researchers have placed on its throat. The fish then pivots and dives to strike its throat against the sandy bottom of its tank with a glancing blow. Then it returns to the mirror. Depending on which scientists you ask, this moment represents either a revolution or a red herring. Alex Jordan, an evolutionary…

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An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have

An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have

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By Deborah M Gordon Like a brain, an ant colony operates without central control. Each is a set of interacting individuals, either neurons or ants, using simple chemical interactions that in the aggregate generate their behaviour. People use their brains to remember. Can ant colonies do that? This question leads to another question: what is memory? For people, memory is the capacity to recall something that happened in the past. We also ask computers to reproduce past actions – the…

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Vast ecosystem beneath the Earth’s surface discovered

Vast ecosystem beneath the Earth’s surface discovered

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The Guardian reports: The Earth is far more alive than previously thought, according to “deep life” studies that reveal a rich ecosystem beneath our feet that is almost twice the size of that found in all the world’s oceans. Despite extreme heat, no light, minuscule nutrition and intense pressure, scientists estimate this subterranean biosphere is teeming with between 15bn and 23bn tonnes of micro-organisms, hundreds of times the combined weight of every human on the planet. Researchers at the Deep…

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The insect apocalypse is here. What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?

The insect apocalypse is here. What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?

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Brooke Jarvis reports: Sune Boye Riis was on a bike ride with his youngest son, enjoying the sun slanting over the fields and woodlands near their home north of Copenhagen, when it suddenly occurred to him that something about the experience was amiss. Specifically, something was missing. It was summer. He was out in the country, moving fast. But strangely, he wasn’t eating any bugs. For a moment, Riis was transported to his childhood on the Danish island of Lolland,…

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The unexamined inner lives of insects

The unexamined inner lives of insects

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Lars Chittka and Catherine Wilson write: René Descartes’s dog, Monsieur Grat (‘Mister Scratch’), used to accompany the 17th-century French philosopher on his ruminative walks, and was the object of his fond attention. Yet, for the most part, Descartes did not think very highly of the inner life of nonhuman animals. ‘[T]he reason why animals do not speak as we do is not that they lack the organs but that they have no thoughts,’ Descartes wrote in a letter in 1646….

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Meet the spiders that feed milk to their young

Meet the spiders that feed milk to their young

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The New York Times reports: The act of breast-feeding is so fundamental to being a mammal that we named ourselves after it. (“Mammalis” translates to “of the breasts.”) But over time, scientists have discovered that other animals also produce nutrient-rich elixirs to feed their young, including flamingos, cockroaches and male emperor penguins. The latest addition to the cast of organisms that lactate — or something like it — is a species of jumping spider. Researchers in China have discovered that…

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Should evolution treat our microbes as part of us?

Should evolution treat our microbes as part of us?

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Jonathan Lambert writes: Twilight falls on the Tanzanian plain. As the sky turns a deeper purple, a solitary spotted hyena awakens. She trots along the border of her clan’s territory, marking the boundary with a sour paste from under her tail. She sniffs a passing breeze for hints of itinerant males interested in mating, giving little attention to her stomach’s rumbling over the remnants of the previous night’s hunt or the itch on her flank. The lone hyena chooses what…

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The health of an ecosystem (including your home) depends on its biodiversity

The health of an ecosystem (including your home) depends on its biodiversity

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William Foster writes: Rob Dunn invites us on a safari in pursuit of the wildlife teeming on our bodies and in every corner of our homes. For him, the creatures that sprawl in the human navel and under the bathroom shower head elicit the kind of wonder most of us would feel only on seeing the denizens of Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater or the Great Barrier Reef off Australia. Dunn is more than an informed and entertaining commentator, a David Attenborough…

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Meet the trillions of viruses that make up your virome

Meet the trillions of viruses that make up your virome

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Every surface of our body – inside and out – is covered in microorganisms: bacteria, viruses, fungi and many other microscopic life forms. vrx/Shutterstock.com By David Pride, University of California San Diego and Chandrabali Ghose, The Rockefeller University Leer en español. If you think you don’t have viruses, think again. It may be hard to fathom, but the human body is occupied by large collections of microorganisms, commonly referred to as our microbiome, that have evolved with us since the…

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‘Hyperalarming’ study shows massive insect loss

‘Hyperalarming’ study shows massive insect loss

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The Washington Post reports: Insects around the world are in a crisis, according to a small but growing number of long-term studies showing dramatic declines in invertebrate populations. A new report suggests that the problem is more widespread than scientists realized. Huge numbers of bugs have been lost in a pristine national forest in Puerto Rico, the study found, and the forest’s insect-eating animals have gone missing, too. In 2014, an international team of biologists estimated that, in the past…

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Nanotubular highways between cells act as conduits for transferring all kinds of cargo

Nanotubular highways between cells act as conduits for transferring all kinds of cargo

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Viviane Callier writes: When the physician and scientist Emil Lou was an oncology fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center about a decade ago, he was regularly troubled by the sight of something small but unidentifiable in his cancer-cell cultures. Looking through the microscope, he said, he “kept finding these long, thin translucent lines,” about 50 nanometers wide and 150 to 200 microns long, extending between cells in the culture. He called on the world-class cell biologists in his building…

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The hidden intelligence of plants

The hidden intelligence of plants

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Rachel Ehrenberg writes: More than 200 years ago, French botanist René Desfontaines instructed a student to monitor the behavior of Mimosa pudica plants as he drove them around Paris in a carriage. Mimosa pudica quickly closes its leaves when touched — presumably as a defense mechanism. Desfontaines was interested in the plants’ response to the continuous vibrations of the ride. Initially, the leaves closed, but after a time, they reopened, despite the shaking. “The plants are getting used to it,”…

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Scientists fear that insects upon which humans depend are declining

Scientists fear that insects upon which humans depend are declining

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The Associated Press reports: A staple of summer — swarms of bugs — seems to be a thing of the past. And that’s got scientists worried. Pesky mosquitoes, disease-carrying ticks, crop-munching aphids and cockroaches are doing just fine. But the more beneficial flying insects of summer — native bees, moths, butterflies, ladybugs, lovebugs, mayflies and fireflies — appear to be less abundant. Scientists think something is amiss, but they can’t be certain: In the past, they didn’t systematically count the…

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Octopuses on ecstasy reveal genetic link to evolution of social behaviors in humans

Octopuses on ecstasy reveal genetic link to evolution of social behaviors in humans

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Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine: By studying the genome of a kind of octopus not known for its friendliness toward its peers, then testing its behavioral reaction to a popular mood-altering drug called MDMA or “ecstasy,” scientists say they have found preliminary evidence of an evolutionary link between the social behaviors of the sea creature and humans, species separated by 500 million years on the evolutionary tree. A summary of the experiments is published Sept. 20 in Current Biology,…

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The first animal genus defined purely by genetic characters represents a new era for classifying animals

The first animal genus defined purely by genetic characters represents a new era for classifying animals

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Charlie Wood writes: The world’s simplest known animal is so poorly understood that it doesn’t even have a common name. Formally called Trichoplax adhaerens for the way it adheres to glassware, the amorphous blob isn’t much to look at. At just a few millimeters across, the creature resembles a squashed sandwich in which the top layer protects, the bottom layer crawls, and the slimy stuffing sticks it all together. With no organs and just a handful of cell types, the…

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