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Experiments provide proof of how traveling in groups protects insects

Few events involving animals are more dramatic than when they band together and head out on the march cross-country. Among examples are the many thousands of wildebeests and other hoofed mammals that form herds and migrate across the African plains. and young locusts also sometimes unite with their...

Experiments provide proof of how traveling in groups protects insects

Few events involving animals are more dramatic than when they band together and head out on the march cross-country. Among examples are the many thousands of wildebeests and other hoofed mammals that form herds and migrate across the African plains. and young locusts also sometimes unite with their...

Flocking together: Study shows how animal groups find their way

A study led by Princeton biologists has revealed a remarkably simple mechanism that allows flocking birds, schooling fish or running herds to travel in unison without any recognized leaders or signaling system. The finding, published in the Feb. 3 issue of Nature, helps settle age-old questions about how animals coordinate their actions. Previously, scientists had looked for subtle signal...

Elephant seal pups suffer from ocean warming

Ocean warming has a negative impact on the condition of elephant seals, reveals a study published in the Open Access journal BMC Biology. High ocean temperatures observed from 1975 to the late 1990s are correlated with a 28% decrease in the weight of elephant seal pups. Elephant seals are shown to be sensitive to ocean temperature changes associated with both long-term 25-year cycles and short-te...

Revueltosaurus skeleton unearthed at Petrified Forest upsets dinosaur tale

The fossilized skeleton of a small crocodile relative excavated last year at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona throws a wrench into theories of how and where the dinosaurs arose more than 210 million years ago at the end of the Triassic Period. The animal, one of many creatures from the Late Triassic known only from their teeth, was thought to be an ancestor of the plant-eating or...

Wright bros. upstaged! Dinos invented biplanes

The evolution of airplanes from the Wright Brothers' first biplanes to monoplanes was an inadvertent replay of the much earlier evolution of dinosaur flight, say two dino flight experts. According to paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee and retired aeronautical engineer R.J. Templin, a small early Chinese dinosaur called Microraptor gui used a two-level, biplane wing configuration to fly from...

New HIV study identifies high-risk subgroups of adolescents

A new study from the Bradley Hasbro Children’s Research Center and Brown Medical School unveils profiles of adolescents at the greatest risk for HIV. Amongst a group of high-risk teens, researchers found that those at highest risk for the disease (those who engaged in the most unprotected sex acts) were mostly white males with mental health problems. Prior studies have found that risky sex...

Cellular traffic backups implicated in skeletal malformations

A defective link in the intracellular protein "transit system" may lie at the heart of some craniofacial defects, new research in zebrafish suggests. In the Sept. 17 online issue of Nature Genetics, Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers report the identification of a mutation that causes severe skeletal deformities in zebrafish by shutting down a critical protein transport pat...

Protein splicing upsets the DNA colinearity paradigm

Understanding medical research problems often relies on the direct, linear relationship between the sequence of a protein and the DNA encoding that protein. In fact, colinearity of DNA and protein sequences is thought to be a fundamental feature of the universal genetic code. However, a paper published today in Science by a team from the Brussels Branch of the global Ludwig Institute for Cancer R...

Swimming 'to the left' gets bacteria upstream, and may promote infection

Yale engineers who study both flow hydrodynamics and how bacteria propel themselves report that one reason for the high incidence of infections associated with catheters in hospital patients may be that some pathogenic bacteria swim "to the left," in a study published in Physical Review Letters. "Escherichia coli (E. coli) and some other pathogenic bacteria with flagella interact with th...

Gene study shows three distinct groups of chimpanzees

The largest study to date of genetic variation among chimpanzees has found that the traditional, geography-based sorting of chimps into three populations—western, central and eastern—is underpinned by significant genetic differences, two to three times greater than the variation between the most different human populations. In the April 2007 issue of the journal PLOS Genetics, researchers...