Biology news

The Future is Now?

Submitted by Yoo on 05/31/2010 - 21:22
Tags: Biology

Local lizard populations have been vanishing at a rate closely linked to the maximum air temperature change in an area during the breeding season.

Artificial Life

Submitted by Yoo on 05/25/2010 - 04:18
Tags: Biology

An entirely synthetic copy of a bacteria genome has been successfully used to recreate the bacteria.

Overfishing gives toxic seaweeds an edge in their competition with corals

Submitted by Yoo on 05/18/2010 - 13:58
Tags: Biology

Seaweed is not just taking advantage of the vacancies appearing due to the dying out of coral: some are actively waging chemical warfare.

A single genetic fault makes one hand mirror the other’s movements

Submitted by Yoo on 05/05/2010 - 11:33
Tags: Biology

A single faulty gene can cause "mirror movements", where moving one side of the body, particularly the hands, causes the other to move unintentionally.

Chimpanzees Prefer Fair Play To Reaping An Unjust Reward

Submitted by Yoo on 04/28/2010 - 10:44
Tags: Biology

Fairness is not only essential to the human social contract, it also plays an important role in the lives of nonhuman primates more generally.

Gut bacteria in Japanese people borrowed sushi-digesting genes from ocean bacteria

Submitted by Yoo on 04/12/2010 - 11:50
Tags: Biology

Gut bacteria that help the Japanese digest seaweed appears to have coopted genes from marine bacteria in the coastal oceans.

Pigeons outperform humans at the Monty Hall Dilemma

Submitted by Yoo on 04/06/2010 - 11:23
Tags: Biology, Mathematics, Cognitive science

Humans are spectacularly bad with thinking about the Monty Hall problem and perform worse than pigeons.

On the evolution of toilets

Submitted by Yoo on 03/23/2010 - 11:36
Tags: Biology

Some plants have evolved toilets in an effort to gather nitrogen.

Bacteria on your keyboard point to your identity but forensic value is unlikely

Submitted by Yoo on 03/22/2010 - 13:07
Tags: Biology

Bacteria from our skins linger on the things we touch and they could act as a sort of living fingerprint.

Gender-Bending Chickens: Mixed, Not Scrambled

Submitted by Yoo on 03/17/2010 - 12:32
Tags: Biology

Unlike mammals, individual chicken cells apparently "know" which sex they are at the time of fertilization and they maintain their own male or female identities throughout life.

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