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Tag: "environments" at biology news

Turn-ons and turn-offs for neurons

...w little doubt that neurons respond to challenging environments by adjusting the expression of genes for appropriate brain functions. Stress, addiction, learning and disease are all believed to change neuronal gene expression by mechanisms involving gene accessibility without changes in DNA sequences, a process c...

NASA-funded robotic sub finds bottom of world's deepest sinkhole

...ronment suggests that it will have applications in environments with similarly sparse features, like rivers or mines. Though initially operated on a tether, DEPTHX eventually operated autonomously, without a tether or human guidance, for eight hours at a time. "The fact that we never lost it, never required a ...

Early exposure to indoor fungus molecules may protect infants against future allergies

...els of microbial exposure," she explains. "Cleaner environments do not have enough microbial components to trigger the immune system response." The UC team reports their findings in the May 2007 edition of the scientific journal Allergy. This epidemiological study is the first to suggest that early-life expos...

Why do oysters choose to live where they could be eaten?

...ecies serve as protection from predators and harsh environments or may be beneficial to future reproductive success. However, in the case of oyster larvae, the selection of a place to call home can be a life or death decision. According to an article in the May edition of Ecological Monographs, a team of scienti...

Alien plants attack using 'resource conservation' as weapon, researchers say

...ien species pose less of a threat in resource-poor environments because they are less able to compete with indigen... that invasive plants can flourish in low-resource environments by adopting efficient ways to use available resources. The finding, which sheds new light on how ...

Diminishing dinosaur steps saved by laser and laptop

...insight into the way these dinosaurs moved and the environments in which they lived. The on-going project - run in conjunction with Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona - is being led by palaeontologist Dr Phil Manning, who received a grant of Euro 9,000 from the Consorci Ruta Minera to fund the laser scanning. ...

Dinosaur hearing, listening to muscle noise, quieter cubicles

... level of clarity and similarity in the acoustical environments of disparate locations from Boston concert halls to New York skyscrapers and Hollywood sound stages. Princeton's Emily Thompson ( emilyt@princeton.edu ), a technology historian, will explore the history of modern sound in early 20th-century United S...

Discovery of new cave millipedes casts light on Arizona cave ecology

...pods that can survive these dark and resource-poor environments can tell us a lot about what makes them so successful as a group." While conducting ecological inventories of 30 caves on the Colorado Plateau of northern Arizona, research by Wynne and Voyles has resulted in the discovery of at least 10 new speci...

In young mice, gregariousness seems to reside in the genes

...nd that young mice from the gregarious strain seek environments that predict the possibility of a social encounter and avoid places where they have experienced social isolation. "They like company. That's the point," says Garet Lahvis, of the gregarious strain of mouse. Lahvis is a professor of surgery in the ...

Good behavior, religiousness may be genetic

...on behavior. "Society as a whole assumes that home environments have large impacts on behavior, but studies in behavior genetics are repeatedly showing that our behavior is also influenced by our genes," says Koenig....

How trees manage water in arid environments

...dry in 15 minutes. Not in Indiana. In semi-arid environments such as the southwestern United States, humidity is so low that water is scarce to begin with and hard to hold onto when there is a rare cloudburst. Rain that collects in puddles is quickly sucked up by evaporation into the dry air. Most of the rest ...

NASA predicts nongreen plants on other planets

...duce sugar. Organisms that live in different light environments absorb the light colors that are most available. For example, there is a type of bacteria that inhabit murky waters where there is little visible light, and so they use infrared radiation during photosynthesis. Scientists have long known that the...

Yale biologists 'trick' viruses into extinction

...orted on the success of phi-6 virus populations in environments containing different mixtures of ordinary "source" bacteria and mutant trap cells that act as "sinks." Their research showed that when the number of trap cells exceeded a key threshold in the mixtures, the virus population could no longer sustai...

Birth rate, competition are major players in hominid extinctions

... time we see a lot of lineages become extinct when environments where the species are found become highly seasonal or unpredictable." Primates evolved in the Paleocene and Eocene when worldwide climate was less seasonal. The beneficial environment allowed primates to evolve as relatively brainy animals that r...

No sex for 40 million years? No problem

...ined bdelloid rotifers living in different aquatic environments across the UK, Italy and other parts of the world. They found genetic and jaw-shape evidence that the rotifers had evolved into distinct species by adapting to differences in their environment. Dr Tim Barraclough from Imperial College London's Div...

Long-lived deep-sea fishes imperiled by technology, overfishing

...fishes' breeding and mortality rates, but deep-sea environments are usually stable. The deep sea is almost completely dark, very near freezing and has very little food ?reasons for the fishes' slow growth and low productivity. "Old fish don't necessarily need to breed every year," Heppell pointed out, "so when...

Lizards 'shout' against a noisy background

...ion years of evolution -- but they live in similar environments with the same obstacles to communication. So Ord is using them as a model to investigate the evolution of such signals. ...

How fish conquered the ocean

...f the bony fishes (teleosts) inhabited fresh water environments for at least 150 million years before they entered the oceans". "Apparently, it was not until the Eocene epoch (about 55 million years ago) that an unparalleled and rapid burst of thousands of new marine teleost species took place as evidenced by ...

New science of metagenomics 'will transform modern microbiology'

...thers could focus on soil and seawater, or managed environments such as sludge processing sites. The large projects would be "virtual" centers collecting data from scientists working at many locations around the world, and would probably need to be sustained for 10 years, the report notes. They would also...

'Hidden-hero' microbes in soil, water may help naturally clean toxic sites

...king, and contaminated aquifers tend to be extreme environments where microorganisms dominate. These microbes are the 'hidden heroes' that do the work of bioremediation. Our new project will provide the basic science necessary to deploy bioremediation technologies at the scales necessary for them to be effective ...

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