Discover Magazine: Living World

Discover Living World

• Koreans, not quite the purest race? | Gene Expression
  PLoS One has a paper out on Korean (South) population genetics and phylogeography, Gene Flow between the Korean Peninsula and Its Neighboring Countries: SNP markers provide the primary data for population structure analysis. In this study, we employed whole-genome autosomal SNPs as a marker set (54,836 SNP markers) and tested their possible effects on genetic ancestry [...]
  
  
• Genetically Identical E. Coli Cells Show a Lot of Individuality | 80beats
  One might think that identical-twin bacteria—clones of each other—would grow up and live very similarly. But a study published today in Science that examined individual bacterial cells in detail found that genetically identical E. Coli cells actually seem to express their genes quite differently, simply because of the random accidents of how their molecular machinery [...]
  
  
• The Enemy Within: Deadly Viruses Show Up in Genomes of Humans & Other Animals | 80beats
  In a medical sense, you’d be wise to steer clear of filoviruses, a group that includes the deadly Ebola, and bornaviruses, which cause neurological diseases. But in a genetic sense, it may not be possible to avoid them. A new study in PLoS pathogens shows that bits and pieces of these viruses have been floating [...]
  
  
• We Can Rebuild You: 8 Ways Science Can Fix Your (or Your Cat’s) Broken Body | Science Not Fiction
  Star Wars, A.I., The Six Million Dollar Man, Star Trek and a host of other science-fiction films all share a particular futurist’s dream: a broken body is repaired with an artificial replacements. Reality is finally catching up with our imaginations. Stem cells, mind-controlled arms, osso-integrated prostheses, exoskeletons, and xenotransplants are here. It’s important to [...]
  
  
• Pocket Science: plague-running mice, and how to watch mutations in real time | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  Not Exactly Pocket Science is a set of shorter write-ups on new stories with links to more detailed takes, where available. It is meant to complement the usual fare of detailed pieces that are typical for this blog. Plague-running mice create epidemics The bacterium behind bubonic plague – Yersinia pestis – has a notorious track [...]
  
  
• The End of Sex Week: Darwin, Sex, and Dada | The Loom
  [This is the last post for Sex Week] The animal kingdom is filled with wild extravagances, and a lot of them have something to do with sex. Hermit crabs wave their claws, swordtail fish flash their swordtails, manakins leap and buzz their wings. Darwin considered these displays so important and so puzzling (”the sight of a [...]
  
  
• Finland, still going its own way | Gene Expression
  Dienekes points to a new paper which highlights genetic variation in Fenno-Scandinavia (or in this case, Finland, Sweden and Denmark). A two-dimensional plot with the variation is pretty illustrative of what you’d expect: Finns are genetic outliers in Europe, to some extent even in comparison to Estonians, who speak a very similar language. But, I wonder [...]
  
  
• Are Eyes From Flies the Future of Solar Technology? | Discoblog
  Scientists are eyeing the future of solar technology–specifically, fly eyes. Turns out those bubbly-looking spectators might be just the ticket to more-efficient solar cells, researchers from Penn State University say. Blowflies have peepers that would help solar panels collect light more efficiently, and creating these fly-eye molds was a feat in itself, according to Discovery News. [...]
  
  
• Isolated in the Farallons, Biologists Have Bizarre “Island Invasion Dreams” | Discoblog
  Scientists stationed on Farallon Islands, which has one of the world’s most delicate ecosystems, don’t just keep tabs on native species such as sea lions and puffins–they’ve also have been recording their dreams for the past two decades. The findings? Dreams that are “eerily similar,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle: “Whether scientists are on the island for [...]
  
  
• Sex Week continued: Water strider blues | The Loom
  [This is my third post of Sex Week] Here’s a song for the male water strider, from the days when Rod Stewart could do no wrong: In my first two posts for Sex Week, I wrote about the delights of courtship: the alluring, informative fragrance of yeast and the seductive buzz of electric fish. These signals stir [...]
  
  
• Sex Week continued: when love shocks | The Loom
  [This is my second post of Sex Week] In the sexual universe, all sorts of things can feel good, even if we humans have a hard time imagining how they can bring any pleasure. Electricity, for example, may be nothing for us beyond a painful shock. But for some fishes, it is the essence of [...]
  
  
• Video: A Hairy Carpet of Daddy Longlegs Fends off Predators | Discoblog
  Look closely: This hairy, pulsating carpet is actually a group of harvestmen, an arachnid commonly known as daddy longlegs. This aggregation of harvestmen helps fend off potential predators. When one of the arachnids senses danger, he moves his body up and down to create a vibration; a whole jiggling group of daddy longlegs provides an even greater [...]
  
  
• Snap, phenotype, genotype and fitness | Gene Expression
  One of the main criticisms of the population genetic pillar of the modern evolutionary synthesis was that too often it was a game of “beanbag genetics”. In other words population geneticists treated genes as discrete independent individual elements within a static sea. R.A. Fisher and his acolytes believed that the average effect of fluctuations of [...]
  
  
• Finally! A Self-Sustaining, Sewage-Processing, Poop-Powered Rocket | Discoblog
  Today’s sewage is tomorrow’s rocket fuel–at least, according to Stanford researchers. Raw sewage has long posed a problem for scientists who aim to get rid of it. That’s because the chemical byproduct of the bacteria that break down waste is nitrous oxide–a greenhouse gas also known as laughing gas. The proposed solution? Using the nitrous oxide produced [...]
  
  
• Jellyfish eye genes suggest a common origin for animal eyes | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  Jellyfish may seem like simple blobs but some have surprisingly sophisticated features, including eyes. These are often just light-sensitive pits but species like the root-arm medusa have complex ‘camera’ eyes, with a lens that focuses light onto a retina. Not only are these organs superficially similar to ours, they’re also constructed from the same genetic [...]
  
  
• Scientists Find Giant, 15-Pound Rat. (Don’t Worry, It’s Extinct.) | Discoblog
  The rats scuttling around the tracks of the New York City subway pale in comparison to a gargantuan species recently discovered in East Indonesia. In fact, the recently discovered rat tipped the scales at a somewhat frightening 13 pounds. That’s sizably heftier than today’s house rat (which averages 5 ounces) and burliest wild rats (which weigh about four-and-a-half [...]
  
  
• Gonna Have A Fungal Good Time [With Apologies to James Brown] | The Loom
  If yeast could sing, it might sound something like this. This single-celled fungus–for which we should give thanks for bread, beer, and wine–can reproduce in several ways. Most of the time, it produces buds that eventually split off as free-living cells of their own. Its daughters are identical to itself, carrying the same two sets of [...]
  
  
• Study: Belly-Flopping Frogs Evolved Big Jumps Before Smooth Landings | Discoblog
  Apparently it’s hard to teach an old frog a new trick: landing on its legs. As painfully demonstrated in the video below, the primitive frog family Leiopelmatidae prefers to belly-flop. In a study soon to appear in the journal Naturwissenschaften, Southern Illinois University’s Richard Essner Jr. and his team compared, via high-speed video, five frog species’ [...]
  
  
• It’s sex week on the Loom | The Loom
  Birds do it, bees do it, even educated viruses do it. And for some reason my stack of interesting scientific papers is particularly heavy at the moment with research on the evolution of sex. So let’s not be shy. All this week, I will blog about sex. [Image: mating sand wasps, Alex Wild]
  
  
• Diseases of the Silk Road | Gene Expression
  Nature has two papers out about something called “Behçet’s disease.” It has apparently also been termed the “Silk Road Disease”, because of its associations with populations connected to the Central Eurasian trade networks.Though described by Hippocrates 2,500 years ago, apparently it was “discovered” only in the 20th century by a Turkish physician. The reason that [...]
  
  
• The Best Flavor of Geoengineering Stills Leaves a Bad Taste | Science Not Fiction
  The Eyjafjallajökull eruption as seen by NASA’s Terra satellite In theory, geoengineering seems like the ideal remedy for our climate ills. Some white reflective roofs here, a little ocean fertilization there, a few simulated volcanic eruptions, and voilà! you have a potential fix for one of the world’s most intractable problems. But there’s good reason to believe [...]
  
  
• 10,000 years ago there were no “Southeast Asians” | Gene Expression
  Mexico: Ancient woman suggests diverse migration: A scientific reconstruction of one of the oldest sets of human remains found in the Americas appears to support theories that the first people who came to the hemisphere migrated from a broader area than once thought, researchers say. Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History on Thursday released photos of [...]
  
  
• Personal genomics & the state | Gene Expression
  Dr. Daniel MacAthur & Dan Vorhaus offer their takes on the recent hearings in Congress on the direct-to-consumer genomics industry, A sad day for personal genomics & “From Gulf Oil to Snake Oil”: Congress Takes Aim at DTC Genetic Testing. I guess I lean toward light regulation. I don’t think that DTC personal genomics will [...]
  
  
• Using Urine to Make the Garden Grow | Discoblog
  They were perfectly lovely, the beets Surendra Pradhan and Helvi Heinonen-Tanski grew: round and hefty, a rich burgundy, their flavor sweet and faintly earthy like the dirt from which they came. Unless someone told you, you’d never know the beets were grown with human urine. Pradhan and Heinonen-Tanski, environmental scientists at the University of Kuopio in [...]
  
  
• Pocket Science – belly-flopping frogs, and fattening marmots | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  Not Exactly Pocket Science is a set of shorter write-ups of new stories with links to more detailed takes by the world’s best journalists and bloggers. It is meant to complement the usual fare of detailed pieces that are typical for this blog. Frogs evolved to jump before they perfected landings Most frogs are can leap large [...]
  
  
• One principal component to rule them all? | Gene Expression
  Despite the reality that I’ve cautioned against taking PCA plots too literally as Truth, unvarnished and without any interpretive juice needed, papers which rely on them are almost magnetically attractive to me. They transform complex patterns of variation which you are not privy to via your gestalt psychology into a two or at most three [...]
  
  
• Moss That Makes Mushroom Clouds: A Plant Explodes to Spread Its Spores | 80beats
  Let’s say you’re a peat moss plant. Since you’re stuck in one place, and it’s low to the ground where there’s little wind or air turbulence, you have to find a way to shoot your spores way up into the air where they can be dispersed. In reality, mosses have conquered this problem by shooting their [...]
  
  
• Mosses use explosive cannons and mushroom clouds to spread their spores | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  As you read this, forceful explosions are rocking the planet, covering it in mushroom clouds. Thankfully, nuclear winter isn’t going to befall us quite yet. These explosions are caused by biological cannons rather than man-made bombs and the clouds they produce are mere millimetres high. They are the means by which peat mosses disperse their [...]
  
  
• Disease as a byproduct of adaptation | Gene Expression
  How we perceive nature and describe its shape are a matter of values and preferences. Nature does not take notice of our distinctions; they exist only as instruments which aid in our comprehension. I’ve brought this up in relation to issues such as categorization of recessive vs. dominant traits. The offspring of people of [...]
  
  
• 16,000 Feet Under the Sea: Deepest Hydrothermal Vent Discovered | 80beats
  Want to know what early or extraterrestrial life might look like? You might try looking at Earth’s extremes: the coldest, highest, and deepest places on our planet. One unmanned research vehicle just tried the last of these strategies, and took samples from a hydrothermal vent plume 16,000 feet under the sea–about 2,000 feet deeper than [...]
  
  
• Is Global Warming a Boon for the Yellow-Bellied Marmot? | 80beats
  Yellow-bellied marmots are taking to global warming just fine—so far. A Nature study of the hibernating Rocky Mountain-dwellers found that over the last 30-plus years, the marmots have grown both in girth and in population, and the researchers think they know why. Study author Arpat Ozgul says that the marmots have limited time to accomplish the [...]
  
  
• How I got my genes tested, and the birth of Science Writer Disease Risk Top Trumps | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  Thanks to genetic testing, I now know that If it were biologically possible to have a baby with Mark Henderson, Science Editor of the Times, that baby would be certain to have wet earwax. And he or she would definitely not have cystic fibrosis. Science! This is all in aid of a session at the UK [...]
  
  
• The olm: the blind cave salamander that lives to 100 | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  In the caves of Slovenia and Croatia lives an animal that’s a cross between Peter Pan and Gollum. It’s the olm, a blind, cave-dwelling salamander, also called the proteus and the “human fish”, for its pale, pinkish skin. It has spent so long adapting to life in caves that it’s mostly blind, hunting instead with [...]
  
  
• The Mystery of the Macaroni Penguin and the Bad Egg | Discoblog
  Given an allotment of two eggs each year, a lady macaroni penguin starts out by laying a smallish bad egg–then she goes on to lay a bigger, good one. If all goes well, the big egg hatches into a baby bird, but the smaller one never does. Why bother laying an egg that never [...]
  
  
• Frog Species Are Hopping Into Extinction Before They’re Even Discovered | 80beats
  Andrew Crawford and his colleagues discovered 11 new species of amphibians in Panama. But they wish it hadn’t happened this way. The team just completed a long-term study of amphibians in Panama’s Omar Torrijos National Park, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showing the startling disappearance of species there. Co-author Karen Lips [...]
  
  
• Would You Pick Your Child’s Sexual Orientation? | Science Not Fiction
  “Would you take a magic pill to make yourself straight?” asked an audience member at a GLBT forum at Winona State University in Minnesota. The concept is not pure fantasy: scientists have flipped a genetic switch to make female mice homosexual and rogue pediatric endocrinologist, Maria New, has been giving mothers dexamethasone to prevent lesbian [...]
  
  
• Genome-wide association for newbies | Gene Expression
  It looks like Genomes Unzipped has their own Mortimer Adler, with an excellent posting, How to read a genome-wide association study. For those outside the biz I suspect that #4, replication, is going to be the easiest. In the early 2000s a biologist who’d been in the business for a while cautioned about reading too [...]
  
  
• What’s in a (Species) Name? Maybe the Power to Fend Off Extinction | Discoblog
  The blue pepper-pot beetle, St. John’s jellyfish, and the queen’s executioner beetle–these distinctly British-sounding organisms share a few things in common. For one, they all have brand new names, thanks to the ingenuity of the British public. The trio received these new names from public entries in a competition organized by The Guardian, Natural England, and [...]
  
  
• Reprogrammed stem cells carry a memory of their past identities | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  Imagine trying to rewind the clock and start your life anew, perhaps by moving to a new country or starting a new career. You would still be constrained by your past experiences and your existing biases, skills and knowledge. History is difficult to shake off, and lost potential is not easily regained. This is a [...]
  
  
• From the Vault: Us and Them Among the Slime Molds | The Loom
  [An old post I'm fond of] Scoop up some dirt, and you’ll probably wind up with some slime mold. Many species go by the common name of slime mold, but the ones scientists know best belong to the genus Dictyostelium. They are amoebae, and for the most part they live the life of a rugged individualist. [...]
  
  
• From the Vault: Clint Is Dead, Long Live Clint! | The Loom
  [A post from 2005 I'm fond of] Clint, the chimpanzee in this picture, died several months ago at a relatively young age of 24. But part of him lives on. Scientists chose him–or rather, his DNA–as the subject of their first attempt to sequence a complete chimpanzee genome. In the new issue of Nature, they’ve unveiled [...]
  
  
• Photos From the Gulf’s Great Sea Turtle Relocation | 80beats
  In early July we brought you news of the Great Sea Turtle Relocation–an ambitious plan dreamed up by conservationists to scoop up some 70,000 sea turtle eggs from Gulf Coast beaches, to prevent the hatchlings from crawling straight into oil-fouled waters. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service noted that the plan carried considerable risks to [...]
  
  
• Humans, Fish, & Flies Share a 600-Million-Year-Old Sperm Gene | 80beats
  Dear male reader: Just so you know, your sperm isn’t that different from a sea anemone’s. Sperm is so vital, a new study in PLoS Genetics found, that one of the genes responsible for it hasn’t changed in 600 million years. Insects, humans, marine invertebrates, other mammals, even fish—the males of all these creatures share a [...]
  
  
• More Jews, fewer markers | Gene Expression
  At around the same time that the two big Jewish genetics papers came out, there was another one in BMC Genetics which I had overlooked. It’s open access so you can read the whole thing, but seems like they used 32 STR’s as markers. Their primary finding about Jewish populations was that there was a [...]
  
  
• From the Vault: What’s A Gene For? | The Loom
  [An old post from 2005 I'm fond of] There was a time not that long ago when sequencing a single gene would be hailed as a scientific milestone. But then came a series of breakthroughs that sped up the process: clever ideas for how to cut up genes and rapidly identify the fragments, the design of [...]
  
  
• Paleontologists Find Treasure Trove of Fossils in Marsupial Death Pit | 80beats
  What 15 million years ago was very bad for Australian marsupials is now very good for paleontologists: Researchers have uncovered a death trap, an underground limestone cave where hundreds of animals stumbled to their demise. A paper published today in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology details the resulting fossil menagerie, which includes an extinct wombat-like marsupial known [...]
  
  
• Bearded goby munches jellyfish, ignores toxic gases, is generally very hard | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  The Benguela region, off the coast of Namibia, is a shadow of its former self. In the first half of the 20th century, it was one of the world’s most productive ocean areas and supported a thriving fishing community. Today, the plentiful stocks of sardines and anchovies, and the industries that overexploited them, are gone. [...]
  
  
• My Excrement, Myself: The Unique Genetics of a Person’s Gut Viruses | 80beats
  Identical twins don’t share everything. The mix of viruses in a person’s gut, a new study says, is unique to each of us, even if we share nearly all our DNA with another person. That is, at least according to our poop. This year scientists have been working to decode the genetics of the beneficial microbes [...]
  
  
• From the Vault: Love Darts In the Backyard | The Loom
  [An old post I'm fond of] Spring is finally slinking into the northeast, and the backyard wildlife here is shaking off the winter torpor. Our oldest daughter, Charlotte, is now old enough to be curious about this biological exuberence. She likes to tell stories about little subterranean families of earthworm mommies and grub daddies, cram grapes [...]
  
  
• Fossil May Reveal When Humanity’s Ape Ancestors Split from Monkeys | 80beats
  Perhaps you’re one of those people who get their dander up when you hear creationists saying “I’m not descended from some monkey” not only for the obvious reason, but also because you can’t help but blurt out, “No, you mean ‘ape!’ We’re apes, not monkeys.” Indeed, our superfamily, Hominoidea, split from the group labeled “old world [...]