Tag: "bird" at biology news

Art and music for the birds

...at have artists offered the natural world" Would a bird even like rock and roll" Conceptual sculptor Eliz...necdotal evidence suggests that certain species of bird listen to and replicate human song. “My interest with the piece was to get us to think about the i...

ASU research shows connection between testosterone, dietary antioxidants and bird coloration

...r work on zebra finches, a common domesticated pet bird originally from Australia. Carotenoids are known to play several key roles in birds and fish, including contributing to their bright colors, which acts as a signal to attract potential mates. They also act as an antioxidant in the body, which improve...

Study investigates 'divorce' among Galapagos seabirds

...er 100 to 120 days of parental care until the baby bird can fly. The parents will usually continue to pro...es that addresses divorce in successfully breeding bird pairs, Maness said. “This study really predicts that the probability of divorce increases with the ...

CU study reveals why starling females cheat

...ty of California-Berkeley. Usually, if a female bird (and at times if a human female) is caught cheatin...chicks on her own. But because superb starlings, a bird common to East Africa, are cooperative breeders, females have more incentive to stray, said Rubenste...

The mouflons of the Kerguelen archipelago

...ands to study the impact of introduced cats on the bird populations. Noticing that the mouflon population appeared to be thriving, he suggested to Réale that this population could be studied from a genetic viewpoint. Dave Coltman, a professor at the University of Alberta and a specialist in ungulate genet...

Eavesdropping comes naturally to young song sparrows

...nly two of the adult tutors were used. Each young bird was paired up with an adult in a large chamber and...actions were recorded and played to a second young bird in a separate chamber. The next day, the second young bird was paired with a second tutor and the f...

'Personality-gene' makes songbirds curious

...sts. They tested the exploratory behaviour of each bird soon after it left the nest (Early Exploratory Beh...ral test, the biologists measured the time until a bird had visited four artificial "trees" (see figure 1) after being released in the observation room. In ...

Global survey of lizards reveals greater abundance of animals on islands than on mainland ecosystems

... animal extinctions and a full 90 percent of known bird extinctions in the last 400 years. Our study suggests that islands will continue to be vulnerable worldwide.? “Many people, myself included, enjoy visiting islands for their spectacular wildlife,?adds Buckley. “Our research suggests that we must ...

Danish researches solve virus puzzle

How is virus as for example HIV and bird flu able to make the cells within a human body wor...e researchers use a pseudoknot which is related to bird flu. When the ribosome encounters a pseudoknot it has to unravel the knot before the reading can pro...

Deconstructing brain wiring, one neuron at a time

... particles was replaced with its equivalent from a bird virus. This prevented the modified rabies virus fr...ll ?unless they had been engineered to express the bird virus's receptor, a bird cell surface protein known as TVA. Such neurons will then be "disguised" as...

NIAID expands capability for influenza research and surveillance

...nce of influenza viruses in aquatic birds and live bird markets in Hong Kong, which helped shed light on the natural history of flu viruses. Further, scientists conducted training courses in animal influenza surveillance, developed diagnostic tools to detect animal flu viruses, and generated viruses suita...

UCI scientists reconstruct migration of avian flu virus

...e geographic distribution of influenza A H5N1, the bird flu strain. While previous work informally identif...ian flu has been isolated almost exclusively among bird populations. The H5N1 virus has only sporadically been passed on from a bird host to humans; there i...

Despite their heft, many dinosaurs had surprisingly tiny genomes

...omes: By measuring lacunae in dinosaur and extinct bird specimens housed at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology and at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., they were able to determine just how big the various extinct species' osteocytes had been. "These fossils let us sample species through...

Cambodian vulture nests offer hope for species

...illed vultures, one of the world's most threatened bird species. Found in heavily forested country just east of the Mekong River in Cambodia's Stung Treng Province, the colony also represents one of the only known slender-billed vulture nesting areas in the world, and therefore one of the last chances f...

New details on how the immune system recognizes influenza

...similar, epitopes are between different strains of bird and human influenza viruses. Knowing this is important because the virus rapidly mutates and can swap gene segments between strains, which could increase the ability of an avian virus to be transmissible to humans. In addition, only a handful of t...

Bypassing eggs, flu vaccine grown in insect cells shows promise

...ge amounts much more quickly, a key advantage if a bird flu pandemic were to occur. “Eggs can be very c...important to a world facing the threat of pandemic bird flu. For decades the nation’s efforts to prevent flu have centered on growing flu virus in hundre...

NIAID DNA vaccine for H5N1 avian influenza enters human trial

...widespread sickness and death in domestic and wild bird populations. As of December 27, 2006, 261 laboratory-confirmed human cases of H5N1 had been reported to the World Health Organization, resulting in death of more than half of infected individuals. While human cases remain relatively rare and are larg...

Is there a pilot in the insect?

...thousand and one million neurons. When an insect, bird or pilot flies over land, the image of the ground below sweeps from front to back across the central part of the visual field, creating an "optic flow", which is defined as the angular speed at which the ground contrasts move past. By definition, th...

Researchers develop technique for bacteria crowd control

... Besides swimming bacteria, other examples include bird flocks, fish schools, motor proteins in living cell, and even swarms of communicating nano-robots. "We have presented experimental studies of collective bacterial swimming in thin fluid films where the dynamics are essentially two-dimensional an...

Large size crucial for Amazon forest reserves

...etches of primary forest. The article summarizes bird survey results from the world's largest and longes...en studying a 13-year data set of more than 40,000 bird captures in 23 isolated and non-isolated plots of forest, ranging from 1 to 600 hectares. Richard Bi...

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