Tag: "flight" at biology news

Massive herds of animals found to still exist in Southern Sudan

...e early ’80s. Using the same methodology, the same flight lines, the same flight height, they began an aerial survey of three of the four blocks surveyed earlier: Boma National Park...

Small, self-controlled planes combine plant pathology and engineering

...tonomous technology enables us to have coordinated flight with multiple aircraft. In other words, we can have two aircraft sampling pathogens at the same time but at different altitudes.” Schmale has used the small, self-controlled planes to collect samples of the fungal genus Fusarium tens to hundreds o...

Prey not hard-wired to fear predators

...how the kind of vigilance, clustering behavior and flight observed in the same species living with wolves, bears or tigers. For example, elk in the mountains of Siberia—who subsist alongside tigers, wolves and bears-- responded five times faster to the recordings than did elk in Rocky Mountain National Pa...

Mule deer moms rescue other fawns

...nce to just the youngest fawns. Whitetails rely on flight rather than fight for most of their lives, so this may affect their ability to mount an aggressive defence," Lingle said. ...

NIAID expands capability for influenza research and surveillance

...nimal flu surveillance covering all major domestic flight paths of migratory birds. This center also will carry out a human influenza surveillance study in Thailand and will monitor U.S. agricultural workers who work with swine. Emory University, Atlanta (principal investigator—Dr. Richard Compans) Thi...

Flies don't buzz about aimlessly!

...ass on a warm summer evening, especially since its flight path seems to be so erratic? Mark Frye at the Univ...plore their environment using a series of straight flight paths punctuated by rapid 90° body-saccades. Some of these manoeuvres avoid obstacles in their path....

Bones in motion: Brown scientists to create new 3-D X-ray system

...stand the evolution of complex movements, from the flight of birds to the leap of frogs. "This will be like having X-ray vision ?you'll be able to see through skin and muscle and watch a skeleton move in 3-D," said Elizabeth Brainerd, the Brown University biology professor overseeing development of the n...

Despite their heft, many dinosaurs had surprisingly tiny genomes

... genomes typical of birds may have co-evolved with flight as a means of conserving energy," says Edwards, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and curator of ornithology in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoolog...

Smithsonian scientists discover new marine species in eastern Pacific

... around a tropical island that's only a three-hour flight from the United States, that half the animals you see are unknown to science," Collin said. "Overwhelming diversity," said Jon Norenburg, an expert in ribbon worms from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. More than 50 percent of ...

Is there a pilot in the insect?

... wing muscles, which let the insects correct their flight and avoid crashes. Could these same neurons be use...rs obtained these results by modeling the overland flight navigation of insects using experiments carried out on OCTAVE, a captive flying robot microhelicopte...

Bats prey on nocturnally migrating songbirds

...ts. The danger seems especially acute where birds' flight routes converge around the Mediterranean basin, such as the Iberian Peninsula. This newly recognized hazard adds to the numerous obstacles that sea and desert crossings already represent for fragile migratory passerines. Actually, the newly uncovered...

Weighty viruses

...e light is sent to a CCD camera, which records the flight path of the trapped particle. The rest of the light goes to a measuring device that precisely analyzes the scattering signal. The scattered light is different from the initial light beam because the virus particle in the electric field of the ion tra...

Some butterflies travel farther, reproduce faster

...pulations. For those reasons, natural selection on flight and reproductive capability acts primarily on the females. Travelers reproduce more quickly This study examined whether there is a difference in physiology between the females in the newly established populations and females in the older popula...

Air travel and flu: Post-9/11 restrictions delayed start of season

...2001?002 flu season in France, where there were no flight restrictions. Although other factors may possibly have been involved, the findings suggest that air travel affects both the peak date and the rate of spread of flu. This does not prove that travel restriction would be effective in altering the course...

Dragonfly's metabolic disease provides clues about human obesity

...tive capabilities, can mechanically isolate single flight muscles and measure their mechanical power output ...ignaling molecule was chronically activated in the flight muscles of parasite-infected dragonflies, but not in muscles from healthy dragonflies. Activation o...

Mars mission Risk 29: Scientists research ways to reduce radiation-induced brain damage

Among the gravest risks of a manned flight to Mars ranks the possibility that massive amounts of solar and cosmic radiation will decimate the brains of astronauts, leaving them in a vegetative state, if they survive at all. Dubbed "Risk 29" by NASA's Mars scientists, the cosmic radiation ri...

Too mellow for our predatory world

...rience. However, as the researchers found out, the flight distance of the reptiles does not sufficiently inc...experiments". At first, they recorded the original flight initiation distance of "naïve" animals. The researchers then experimentally chased the animals for ...

Ancient birds flew on all-fours

...imbs. "The discussions about the origins of avian flight have been dominated by the so-called 'ground up' and 'trees down' hypotheses," Longrich said. "This paper puts forward some of the strongest evidence yet that birds descended from arboreal parachuters and gliders, similar to modern flying squirrels."...

Protowings may have helped bird ancestors cover rough terrain

...recently dominated the debate: one postulates that flight evolved in tree-dwelling ancestors that used their...to be terrestrial dinosaurs that developed powered flight from the ground up. An article by Kenneth P. Dial and two co-authors in the May 2006 issue of BioSc...

Researchers find that bumblebees' flower choice matters

...ng pollen. But why go to such lengths to map the flight of the bumblebee? It may seem random and inconsequential. But it is neither, says Karron, an associate professor of Biological Sciences. The bees are pivotal players in determining which plant populations survive through successful reproduction. If...

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