Tag: "legs" at biology news

Lessons from the orangutans: Upright walking may have begun in the trees

...ans, a research team has found that walking on two legs may have arisen in relatively ancient, tree-dwelli...phery, where the fruit typically is. Moving on two legs and using their arms primarily for balance, or "hand-assisted bipedalism," may have helped them trav...

Discovery of new cave millipedes casts light on Arizona cave ecology

...us was confirmed by analysis of the eighth pair of legs (or gonopods) on the male specimens. Gonopods are highly modified legs used to transfer spermatophores (packets of sperm) to the females during reproduction. For the no...

A rarity among arachnids, whip spiders have a sociable family life

...eir offspring with their long, thin whiplike front legs and how the siblings congregate in social groups. ...s that are used to capture prey. The first pair of legs has developed into long whiplike feelers that are three to four times longer than the remaining thre...

Sleep disturbances affect classroom performance

...s (GPAs) were more likely to have restless, aching legs when trying to fall asleep, difficulty concentrati...s measured by GPA," said Pagel. Both restless legs and difficulty concentrating during the day are symptoms associated with the diagnosis of Attention ...

Cancer researchers add spice to research against rare neuromuscular disease

...terparts, walking more normally and dragging their legs less often. Their muscles appeared to work normally, and they lived 40 percent longer than the untreated mice. In addition, the mice treated with ASC-J9 were able to mate and produce offspring, while their counterparts could not. ASC-J9 appears t...

Biologists call for better choice of model organisms in 'evo-devo'

...ant to understand how insects evolved wings or how legs developed from fins, we need to judiciously choose several models from specific parts of the phylogenetic tree. "There is little point in blindly increasing the diversity of model systems, without some specific goals in mind. "Our toolkit is to...

Breathing easy: When it comes to oxygen, a bug's life is full of it

...ks. Insects employ autoventilation (using wings or legs to pump air through the body), abdominal pumping (using the muscles in the abdomen to pump air), and tracheal compression (getting oxygen to the head and thorax). ...

Drug can quickly mobilize an army of cells to repair injury

... induced new blood vessels to grow in the affected legs of the mice, and combining the drugs had the greatest benefit. "We are now working to set up a clinical trial to test G-CSF in patients with peripheral vascular disease," Link says. "We chose G-CSF in this case because it's not essential that the tr...

Giant insects might reign if only there was more oxygen in the air

...y, "No giants today: tracheal oxygen supply to the legs limits beetle size,'' will be presented Oct. 10 and 11 at Comparative Physiology 2006: Integrating Diversity. The conference will be held Oct. 8-11 in Virginia Beach. The research was carried out by Alexander Kaiser and Michael C. Quinlan of Midweste...

Climate change creates dramatic decline in red-winged black bird population

...the years, Weatherhead's team has put bands on the legs of thousands of red-winged black birds in order to track their nesting habits. They winter in southeastern United States. In mid-July they become gregarious and switch from eating insects to eating corn and have caused millions of dollars of damage. ...

Pressured by predators, lizards see rapid shift in natural selection

... to the lizards on the predator-free islands, long legs were more strongly favored: Survivors had longer legs relative to non-survivors. After another six months, during which time the Anolis lizards grew incre...

Fighting like a girl or boy determined by gene in fruit flies

...g. Males prefer lunges; they rear up on their back legs and snap their forelegs down hard ?sometimes nailing an opponent that is slow to retreat. The flies undergo a major role reversal when the male and female gene versions are switched. With a feminine fruitless gene, male flies adopt more ladylike t...

'Nymph of the sea' reveals remarkable brood

...h other details of her soft part anatomy including legs and eyes. The research team consisted of David Si...l we have found contains soft-part anatomy such as legs and eyes and also includes about twenty eggs, each about half a millimetre in size, and two possible...

How does a zebrafish grow a new tail?

...eople whose hearts, spinal cords, eyes or arms and legs have been badly hurt. Scientists have discovered some of the genes and cell-to-cell communication pathways that enable zebrafish to restore their tail fins. "The ability to regenerate body parts such as those that are damaged by injury or diseas...

Trotting with emus to walk with dinosaurs

... Because they are about the same size, walk on two legs and have similar feet, emus turn out to be the bes... narrow "straddle" of the trackways, meaning their legs were close together. Emus share that characteristic and can be seen crossing over feet all the time,...

Tarantulas produce silk from their feet

...ientists also were able to see the openings on the legs that resemble the silk-producing spigots on spider abdominal spinnerets. The next step, according to Summers, is to investigate whether the silk produced by the feet is the same as that produced by the spinneret. Many spiders can produce seven diff...

MIT engineers probe spiders' polymer art

...ul can make 10,000 webs.) They then use their hind legs as well as their body weight and gravity to elongate the gel into a fine thread. Kojic, who first practiced on silkworms, learned how to extract a microscopic amount of the gel-like solution from the spider's silk-producing major ampullate gland. ...

Researcher gives hard thoughts on soft inheritance

...nce, believed that shore birds acquired their long legs by constantly stretching their legs to lift themselves out of the water and that generations later that kind of environment gave rise to...

Study shows pine bark naturally decreases severe chronic venous insufficiency

...le are not active, blood pools in their leg veins, legs and ankles can become swollen," said Peter Rohdewa...ygen and carbon dioxide concentration in the lower legs was estimated with small sensors attached to the skin. Pycnogenol® treatment was found to significan...

Natural pine bark extract relieves muscle cramp and pain in athletes and diabetics

...audication (a blood vessel disease that causes the legs to easily cramp).This study also used a two-week pre-trial observation period followed by a week of supplementing with Pycnogenol (200 mg per day for one week), followed by a week of observation without Pycnogenol supplementation. Patients with dia...

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