Tag: "flying" at biology news

Massive herds of animals found to still exist in Southern Sudan

...wildlife like that, in such numbers, not even when flying over the mass migrations of the Serengeti,” said F...f survey time, the team used a survey technique of flying systematically along transects making observations of all wildlife, livestock, human activities and ...

Flies don't buzz about aimlessly!

.... Andy Reynolds says, "Our results with freely flying Drosophila appear to be the first reported example of searching behaviour that is both scale-free and intermittent. This suggests that these behaviours are not part of two different searching strategies, but rather represent a single very effective a...

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

... the new system. "Imagine animated X-ray movies of flying bats or flexing knees. It's very cool technology t...on pilot projects to visualize pigs walking, birds flying and frogs jumping, using seed funds from Brown's Office of the Vice President for Research and the N...

Is there a pilot in the insect?

...using experiments carried out on OCTAVE, a captive flying robot microhelicopter that can reproduce much of t...t is known that the sensory motor prowess of these flying miniatures depends on the nervous system, made up of between one hundred thousand and one million ne...

Computer scientists join in search for ivory-billed woodpecker

...meras, Arecont Vision's AV3100s. "It's a fast, flying object," Song said. "And also, the shape of the object ?the shape of the bird ?isn't regular. It's deformable, and from the lighting conditions, it's very difficult to capture." The robot stores images of the birds it has recorded in the hard disk...

Neural bottleneck found that thwarts multi-tasking

... have to do in a very complex environment, such as flying a plane, and find out under what circumstances these tasks may be less vulnerable to dual-task interference," Dux added. For the record, neither Marois nor Dux use their cell phones while driving. "I'm Australian, and it's illegal there, so I'm...

Bumblebee house warming -- it takes a village

...y to maintain fairly stable body temperatures when flying to flowers. Whether and how they maintained nest temperature was poorly understood. But now scientists from the University of Washington and the University of Puget Sound have peered into bumblebee colonies and have discovered some answers. By e...

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

...trong took his first step on the moon in 1969. But flying to Mars, even without humans aboard, is a monument...ers more complex, one possible trajectory involves flying around Venus and using its gravitational pull to sling the spacecraft toward Mars. That means flying...

New biochip helps study living cells, may speed drug development

..."We conducted research with the chip while we were flying in parabolas over the Gulf of Mexico, going from two times Earth's gravity to zero gravity again and again," he said. "There is absolutely no way this experiment could have been done without this chip." The current technology for analyzing cells' ...

Ancient birds flew on all-fours

...Nick Longrich challenges the idea that birds began flying by taking off from the ground while running and sh...rboreal parachuters and gliders, similar to modern flying squirrels." The first fossil of the Jurassic-era dinosaur Archaeopteryx lithographica was discover...

Protowings may have helped bird ancestors cover rough terrain

...le to fly, chukars often use WAIR in preference to flying to gain elevated terrain, and exhausted birds always resort to WAIR. Dial and colleagues describe experiments showing that if the surface area of chukar wings is reduced by plucking or trimming the feathers, WAIR becomes less effective for climbing ...

Melatonin improves mood in winter depression

...elay with respect to sleep similar to what happens flying westward. Some people appear to be tracking to the earlier dusk of winter, causing a similar amount of misalignment but in the phase-advance direction. Symptom severity in SAD patients correlated with the misalignment in either direction. The treatm...

UCLA scientists strengthen case for life more than 3.8 billion years ago

...but in every case, the model has come through with flying colors." Manning agrees, saying he is confident the rocks contain evidence of ancient life, but "it's not a slam dunk." Why is there doubt? After more than 3.8 billion years, the rocks are severely damaged. "They have been folded, distorted, ...

Study finds how organs monitor themselves during early development

...kes ten days to go from embryo to larva to pupa to flying insect. The researchers looked at a larval development phase during which the ovary grows remarkably fast. In three days the number of primordial germ cells rises from twelve cells to 100 cells. The scientists started by looking at larvae with de...

Widespread elephant slaughter discovered in Chad

... off, the tusks removed. "Two days later we were flying west of that area when we saw a poachers' camp. The second time we passed over I saw a guy and a horse and an assault rifle in the poacher's hands. The third time we flew over, this time only about 150 feet above the camp, I could see the man shootin...

U-M researchers take new approach to defeating Gram-negative bugs

...ntibiotics. Because Woodard suspected he might be flying in the face of conventional wisdom on bacteria, he solicited second opinions from the Borstel Research Center in Germany, which does a good deal of work on Gram-negative bacteria. Scientists there were initially skeptical, he said, but eventually, Uw...

Multi-million pound UK Biobank underway

...ocal men and women will be keen to get it off to a flying start." GPs in the area have already been notified, and the first letters to potential participants have been sent out. These were accompanied by a detailed information booklet. Further information is available on request (and via a web site www.ukb...

NHGRI announces new sequencing targets

...truncates), elephant shrew (Elephantulus species), flying lemur (Dermoptera species), mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus), horse (Equus caballus), llama (Llama species), mole (Cryptomys species), pika (Ochotona species), a cousin of the rabbit, kangaroo rat (Dipodomys species) and tarsier (Tarsier species), an...

Scientist uses dragonflies to better understand flight

...s at Cornell University, presented her research on flying systems and fluid dynamics today (Feb. 19) at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In a seminar "Falling Paper, Dragonfly Flight and Making a Virtual Insect," she said the best way to learn about flight is by...

Travelers can avoid jet lag by resetting their body clocks

...also have to buy or rent a light box. Then before flying east, he or she could go to bed and wake up earlie... even following the schedule for a few days before flying would reduce the jet lag experienced upon arrival at the destination. The more days a person follows...

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