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Tag: "assumed" at biology news

Microbes compete with animals for food by making it stink

...e freshly thawed bait than the rotten fish. "So we assumed that had to do with palatability," Hay said. "It could have been that the predators didn't smell the rotten fish, but that's not consistent with what we know about carrion on the roadway. It could have been that the predators smelled it, but didn't w...

British cattle give TB to badgers, finds UC Davis expert

... on neighboring farms. "In the past, policymakers assumed that infected badgers were the source of most cattle TB cases, and could be 'cleaned out' by culling," Woodroffe said. "But our results show not only that culling can increase TB in badger populations, but also that cattle themselves play an importan...

Vanishing beetle horns have surprise function

...l shells. The finding will surprise anyone who assumed hornless Onthophagus adults (usually the females) ...ogy, 'Which came first"'" Most scientists have assumed the sexual dimorphism of some Onthophagus beetles was borne of differential growth; flamboyantly hor...

Global changes alter the timing of plant growth, scientists say

...activity in many plant and animal species and have assumed it was a response to global warming. In the experiment, researchers found that warming accelerated springtime flowering of all species. But they were surprised to find differing responses to elevated carbon dioxide and nitrogen deposition: Wildflower...

'Empty nester' parent birds use recruitment calls to extend offspring care

...birds feed their young directly, but it is usually assumed that care ends when the young leave the nest and begin to forage for themselves. In many species, however, parents and young continue to associate with one another beyond this point of nutritional independence. Because juveniles are poor foragers, th...

Mysterious 'neural noise' actually primes brain for peak performance

...ding our gray matter. The traditional approach has assumed the brain uses the same method computation in general had used up until the mid-80s: You see an image and you relate that image to one stored in your head. But the reality of the cranial world seems to be a confusing array of possibilities and probab...

Need to pull an all-nighter?

...itric oxide. Until recently, glial cells have been assumed to play only a supportive role in the brain. Rosenberg speculates that the molecules that turn on nitric oxide production in glial cells (as yet undiscovered) might provide additional targets for drug development. ...

Plants give up answers in the war on bacteria

...ness, they close to conserve water. It has been assumed that these tiny ports were busy with their photosynthesis business and were merely unwitting doorways to invading bacteria on a plant's surface. Melotto and Underwood, however, have discovered that stomata are an intricate part of the plant's immune ...

Bitter taste identifies poisons in foods

...19 issue of Current Biology. Scientists have long assumed that bitter taste evolved as a defense mechanism to detect potentially harmful toxins in plants. The Current Biology paper provides the first direct evidence in support of this hypothesis by establishing that variants of the bitter taste receptor TA...

Study: Living coral reefs provide better protection from tsunami waves

...relines more effectively. "For our purposes, we assumed that the health of the reef would only be important in terms of the drag it exerted on the wave," said Kunkel, who is currently working as a research assistant at Tsinghua University in China. "If you have a healthy reef, it has lots of live coral br...

Dinosaurs -- stones did not help with digestion

...d their food? Until recently many researchers have assumed that they were helped by stones which they swallowed. In their muscular stomach these then acted as a kind of 'gastric mill'. But this assumption does not seem to be correct, as scientists at the universities of Bonn and Tübingen have now proved. The...

Serengeti patrols cut poaching of buffalo, elephants, rhinos

...ols a day to estimate the amount of poaching. They assumed that arrests per patrol were representative of poaching intensity and not, for instance, that officer training or informant networks improved. "We show that a precipitous decline in enforcement in 1977 resulted in a large increase in poaching and ...

Recurrence of a flu pandemic similar to infamous 1918 flu could kill 62 million

...many decades, published epidemiological literature assumed that mortality rates from the 1918-20 pandemic were distributed fairly equally. A simple population count from that period would lead to the conclusion that about 20 percent of all fatalities occurred in the developed world. "But when you look at the...

Most widely used organic pesticide requires help to kill

...goes about killing the insects it infects has been assumed to be a simple toxin-mediated disruption of the cells that line the insect gut. The damaged cells, according to the prevailing hypothesis, lead to starvation. An alternative hypothesis holds that the spread of the bacterium in infected insects leads ...

Viral marker of human migration suspect

...h Asian, and European. Population geneticists have assumed that the virus has been with humans since their emergence from Africa. "Because of this presumed codivergence with human populations, JCV has been widely used as a genetic marker for human evolution and migration," explained Shackelton, whose fin...

New genetic analysis forces re-draw of insect family tree

...s within those genes. Previously scientists had assumed that flies and moths were most closely related to bees and wasps, with beetles more distantly related to these groups. This new family arrangement also brings the different species of social insects, such as termites and bees, closer together - su...

Scientists solve 30-year-old mystery of mutant mouse's kidney woes

...to four weeks of their birth. Scientists initially assumed that the mutation was causing a form of polycystic kidney disease, but a follow-up study more than a decade later showed that passage of urine from the kidney was blocked, and the condition was renamed congenital progressive hydronephrosis. With as...

Parasitic plants sniff out hosts

...d moving in a circular pattern. In the past, many assumed that the search was random and the location of a host simply a chance encounter. After four days, when the plant was growing flat on the filter paper, the researchers measured the direction of the shoot. The researchers report that 80 percent of th...

Ghost protein leaves fresh tracks in the cell

...les work." Dubreuil and his colleagues initially assumed that ankyrin was the key to targeting spectrin in all cells. But research in many laboratories had failed to find a cue for targeting that acted through ankyrin, so Dubreuil reworked his hypothesis. "We decided to throw out our assumptions and star...

Zebra finch males prefer females with exaggerated maternal traits

...ulus over an unfamiliar one, it has generally been assumed that imprinting itself could not give rise to preferences for novel, exaggerated traits. In their new work, the researchers tested the sexual preferences of zebra finch males that were raised by white parents differing in beak color. For one group o...

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