The Great Beyond

A proposed resolution to restrict human embryonic stem cell research at the University of Nebraska has failed. The University's Board of Regents today split their votes 4-4, defeating a measure that would have limited research to embryonic stem cell lines approved under former President George W. Bush. The resolution needed a majority of five votes to pass.

"That probably settles the question for the time being," Thomas Rosenquist, vice chancellor for research at the University of Nebraska Medical School in Omaha, told Nature. "It's permission to go ahead and take part in 21st-century research with embryonic stem cells."

Nebraska law prohibits the destruction of embryos for research. But the state does allow scientists to follow federal standards in embryonic stem cell research. Earlier this year, President Barack Obama removed government funding restrictions on new stem-cell lines derived from embryos left over from fertility treatment, and an advisory panel is currently mulling over which of hundreds of potential new cell lines to approve.

The governing board's decision "is a big relief", says Angie Rizzino, a stem cell biologist at the University of Nebraska Medical School. "But I fear that they'll be back in a year or two trying to put a block on embryonic stem cell research again."

Posted by Elie Dolgin on November 20, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The disappearance of the huge herbivores that once roamed North America triggered a massive change in the environment with new trees and more fires.

Reporting in Science, researchers say lake sediments show that the decline of mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths and giant beavers allowed broadleaved trees to flourish as the beasties weren’t around to eat them. The rise of these trees then meant that more fuel for fires accumulated.

“Our work thus shows close connections among the late-glacial histories of fire, vegetation, and mammalian herbivores and suggests that the loss of a broad guild of consumers contributed to substantial restructuring of plant communities and an enhanced fire regime,” write Jacquelyn Gill, of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her colleagues.

To make these links Gill’s team looked at sediment from Appleman Lake in Indiana and other sediments from New York sites. They traced fungus spores that live on dung as a proxy for megafauna. As the number of spores in the sediments decreases about 13.8 thousand years ago, new types of pollen appear, showing the increasing dominance of the broadleaf trees. At the same time a big increase in charcoal is seen, showing the increasing number of fires.

The big question though is what does this tell us about why the mammoth died out…

Continue reading "Dung dating illuminates mammoth mystery" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 20, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Human embryonic stem cells could be one step closer to the clinic. Santa Monica, California-based Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) announced today that it has applied to US regulators to launch a new clinical trial aimed at reversing vision loss with retinal cells recreated from embryonic stem (ES) cells.

The company plans to test the stem cell-derived retinal cells in 12 patients suffering from Stargardt's disease, a form of inherited juvenile macular degeneration that affects around one in 10,000 children.

ACT researchers previously showed that ES cells could give rise to retinal pigment epithelium cells, the photoreceptors that go awry in the disease. They then demonstrated that the cells could restore vision in a rat model of retinal disease. And in September, the researchers reported that the cells were long-lasting and safe in a mouse model of Stargardt's.

"Our research clearly shows that stem cell-derived retinal cells can rescue visual function in animals that otherwise would have gone blind," said Robert Lanza, ACT's chief scientific officer, in a statement. "We are hopeful that the cells will be similarly efficacious in patients."

ACT's investigational new drug (IND) application is only the second filing with the US Food and Drug Administration for a therapy involving human ES cells. The first company out of the gate, Menlo Park, California-based Geron Corp., had its stem-cell derived therapy to treat spinal cord injury patients approved last January. But the FDA put a hold on the trial before a single patient had been injected with the cells, citing safety concerns. Geron now says it plans to restart the trial in the second half of next year.

For more on why stem cell-derived transplants could work to delay or prevent blindness, see the June 2009 news feature from the sadly now-defunct Nature Reports Stem Cells.

Image: The left eye of a Stargardt's patient from Özdek et al., Eye 19, 1222–1225 (2005).

Posted by Elie Dolgin on November 19, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

People in Papua New Guinea who took part in cannibalistic rituals appear to have rapidly evolved resistance to the deadly prion disease kuru.

Researchers who performed genetic analysis on 3,000 people from the Eastern Highland populations of the island found a novel gene variant that they say is an acquired resistance factor which was selected for during PNG’s kuru epidemic in the first half of the last century.

In total 709 villagers in these populations ate the brains of their dead in rituals but only 152 died of the CJD-like disease kuru, the team report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“It’s absolutely fascinating to see Darwinian principles at work here. This community of people has developed their own biologically unique response to a truly terrible epidemic, ” says study author John Collinge of the Medical Research Council Prion Unit at University College London (press release).

“The fact that this genetic evolution has happened in a matter of decades is remarkable.”

Collinge suggests that the discovery may shed light on possible cures or treatments for prion diseases in general.

Eating brains in ‘mortuary feasts’ was banned in PNG in the 1950s and kuru has since disappeared.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 19, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Readers of the UK’s second-best selling daily newspaper may already know this, but scientists have answered “the question that has troubled many a young woman as she dresses for a night out: How much should she dare to bare?”

The Daily Mail has noticed a paper in the journal Behaviour that the rest of the British journalism community missed. In this paper Colin Hendrie, of the University of Leeds, and his colleagues report their undercover observations of a Leeds nightclub.

Hendrie, who has previously suggested that kissing was developed ‘to spread germs’, told the Mail the answer to the question is 40%: “Any more than 40 per cent and the signal changes from ‘allure’ to one indicating general availability and future infidelity.”

While many British readers may be puzzled by apparent generalization from one Leeds nightclub to the human population as a whole, the abstract for Hendrie’s paper is so amazing we provide extracts here for your reading pleasure:

Young, sexually mature humans Homo sapiens sapiens of both sexes commonly congregate into particular but arbitrary physical locations and dance. These may be areas of traditional use, such as nightclubs, discotheques or dance-halls or areas that are temporarily commissioned for the same purpose such as at house parties or rock festivals etc.
…
Data revealed that more than 80% of people entering the nightclub did so without a partner and so were potentially sexually available. There was also an approx. 50% increase in the number of couples leaving the nightclub as compared to those entering it seen on each occasion this was measured, indicating that these congregations are for sexual purposes.
…
Various female display tactics were measured and these showed that whilst only 20% of females wore tight fitting clothing that revealed more than 40% of their flesh/50% of their breast area and danced in a sexually suggestive manner, these attracted close to half (49%) of all male approaches seen. These data reveal the effectiveness of clothing and dance displays in attracting male attention and strongly indicate that nightclubs are human display grounds, organised around females competing for the attention of males. Females with the most successful displays gain the advantage of being able to choose from amongst a range of males showing interest in them.

UK readers should feel free to leave the usual “why is my tax money funding this research” in the comments section…

Image: a Leeds club / photo by Al Green via Flickr under creative commons.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 18, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

In 1835, Darwin and his shipmates collected specimens of the Floreana mockingbird in the Galapagos Islands. Now those same specimens may help conservationists re-establish the species to the island that gives them their name.

Although they died out on the isle of Floreana some 50 years after the famous naturalist’s visit, two populations of Mimus trifasciatus still exist on nearby rocks.

In the Royal Society Journal Biology Letters, Paquita Hoeck and colleagues report that genetic analysis shows that one of these populations is highly inbred but comparison with the specimens collected by Darwin reveals that both have unique alleles found in the original Floreana population. For this reason birds from both populations should be used in the forthcoming attempt to reintroduce the animals to the main island, they say.

“Though Darwin knew nothing of DNA, the specimens he and [Beagle captain Robert] FitzRoy collected have, after 170 years of safe-keeping in collections, yielded genetic clues to suggest a path for conservation of this critically endangered and historically important species,” says paper author Karen James, a researcher at the Natural History Museum where the specimens are kept (press release).

Two others authors on the paper may be familiar to Nature News readers: Peter and Rosemary Grant.

See also: Nature's Darwin 200 special.

Image: Natural History Museum

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 18, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

According to new research, the failure of the HIV vaccine used in the disappointing STEP trial may be due to the patients’ immune responses to the vaccine’s viral vector. (AP, MedPage Today)

But the findings, published yesterday in PNAS, are in direct conflict with two earlier independent studies that found the vector had little, if anything, to do with the vaccine’s poor efficacy.

STEP project leaders ended the trial prematurely in 2007 because it seemed like people who got the vaccine were more susceptible to being infected with HIV. Because the vaccine used a vector engineered from adenovirus serotype 5 (Ad5), which is similar to a virus that causes the common cold, the leading hypothesis was that the vaccine caused a heightened immune response in people who had previously been exposed to the cold virus. This would make those people more vulnerable to infection because HIV attacks active immune cells, particularly if those immune cells migrate to mucosal tissues like the gut.

Continue reading "HIV vaccine failure still an enigma" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on November 17, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Meredith Wadman
After a prolonged and painful illness, DeCODE Genetics, the pathbreaking Icelandic genetics and personal genomics firm, at last succumbed yesterday (16 November), filing in US Bankruptcy Court in Delaware for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The Reykjavik-based company, founded in 1996 by neuroscientist Kári Stefánsson, announced its demise in a press release today, saying that the decision followed months of exploring restructuring possibilities.

The press release says that the Chapter 11 proceeding, “to facilitate the sale of substantially all of its assets”, includes an agreement for DeCode to sell its Iceland-based subsidiary, Islensk Erfdagreining, and its drug discovery and development programs, to Florida-based Saga Investments LLC whose investors include Polaris Venture Partners and Arch Venture Partners.

The agreement is subject to court approval.

In case any investors missed the point, the press release noted that “in the event of a liquidation, any recovery for stockholders of deCODE would be highly unlikely”.

For a graphic record of the patient’s ebbing pulse on the NASDAQ over the last decade, click here.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 17, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Two blockbuster cholesterol drugs are not as effective at unclogging arteries as a cheap vitamin for patients already taking cholesterol-lowering statins, according to a new study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine and reported at the American Heart Association meeting in Orlando, Florida.

The new study, with only 208 patients, found that a controlled-release version of the B vitamin niacin, made by Abbott Laboratories (which funded the study), reduced artery plaque significantly better after 14 months than ezetimibe, the active ingredient in Zetia and a combination cholesterol drug Vytorin, both highly profitable pharmaceuticals made by Merck & Co. The trial originally enrolled 363 people but was called off several months early, in July, when investigators concluded there was a clear difference between the two drugs, although they didn't release any results at the time.

Continue reading "Cholesterol drugs' effectiveness called into question — again" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on November 16, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The fossils of whales and plesiosaurs may contain evidence allowing modern scientists to understand the evolution of one of the strangest creatures in the sea.

Osedax worms live by burrowing into the bones of mammals that sink down to the bottom of the sea. Once ensconced on a nice decomposing whale or seal the worms mature into sexual females and acquire a harem of microscope males that live in the gelatinous tubes that surround them.

In a new paper in BMC Biology Robert Vrijenhoek, of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in the United States, and his colleagues say there are at least 17 different species of Osedax, not just the five previously described.

While the team's genetic and morphological analysis has teased out more about the evolutionary relationships between these worms, a big question remains: when did Osedax appear on the global bone-devouring scene?

One possibility is that they split from their worm ancestors about 45 million years ago when ancient whales appeared. Another theory posits they appeared at least 20 million years before the appearance of large marine mammals.

Osedax are soft bodied, so they do not generally leave decent fossils. However if they were around back in the day they may well have bored distinctive holes into the bones of ancient creatures in much the same way as modern Osedax put holes in modern carcasses.

“Consequently, we have distributed whalebones containing Osedax to several paleontologists who are also examining the taphonomy of fossilized bones from plesiosaurs and cetaceans,” write Vrijenhoek and co. “It is to be hoped that these efforts will help us to narrow the age of this remarkable genus of bone-eating worms.”

Vrijenhoek tells Nature that one palaeontologist is already CT scanning some cow bones with Osedax holes in the hope of developing tools to detect traces in fossil whalebones. Other researchers – including those working on Cretaceous plesiosaurs – are also being enlisted in the great historical worm hunt.

Image: Greg Rouse

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 11, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Plant biologists today announced the winning genetic sequences that will be used as a unique species identifier to 'barcode' ever land plant on the planet.

"Everyone has been waiting for this decision for ages," says David Schindel, executive secretary of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL). "Now, the horses can finally leave the gate, and the analysis can proceed."

Earlier this year, CBOL's plant working group published a report comparing seven different DNA regions for their ability to reliably discriminate between plant species. The 52-member panel, led by Peter Hollingsworth of the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, UK, concluded that a combination of two gene regions, known as rbcL and matK, was probably the best species identifier.

These sequences could accurately pinpoint the correct species 72% of the time, and match the remaining plants to the right species group with 100% success. But some members of the working group maintained that there were better options. Some argued for a three-gene barcode, while others wanted to combine the core two-gene barcode with a short-list of 'insurance' regions. (See 'DNA barcodes for plants a step closer')

Broad consensus has won out. At the Third International Barcode of Life Conference in Mexico City today, Hollingsworth declared that the rbcL–matK doubleshot will go ahead as the barcode of choice for land plants, although the plant working group plans to reassess the decision in 18 months.

"This will not be a 'hallelujah' moment in the sense that we'll have 99% ability to detect plants," says Schindel. "But I'm absolutely convinced that this is the best decision we can make at this moment."

Yesterday in Mexico City, the steering committee of the International Barcode of Life Project — "the supercollider of biodiversity", as Schindel called it — also met formally for the first time, ahead of the group's scheduled launch in July 2010. This US$150 million 25-nation initiative aims to barcode 5 million specimens representing 500,000 species over the next 5 years. "This is the largest biodiversity genomics project ever undertaken," says Paul Hebert of the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, who first formally proposed the idea of DNA barcoding in 2003.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Posted by Elie Dolgin on November 10, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A graduate student at Boston University did catch Neisseria meningitidis from an experiment, health officials in the city have confirmed. According to the Boston Globe, genetic analysis matched bacteria from a blood sample provided by the sick student to samples from the lab where he was working.

The globe says the student was working in a relatively low level bio-safety level-2 lab, not a sci-fi, high-tech level-4. Back in 2004 three scientists at the university were infected from their lab, leading the city to clamp down on its regulation and leaving BU with an $8,100 fine.

“It’s well known that people who work in research labs are exposed to the risk of infection,” Thomas Moore, associate provost of BU’s South End medical campus said last month when the infection occurred. “It doesn’t always mean they’re sloppy.’’

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 10, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Hot on the heels of the pig genome comes news of another animal sequenced down on the farm. Writing in this week’s Science, researchers report the genome of Twilight, an adult female Equus caballus.

While this worthy feat of science has attracted much media interest, none of the coverage seems to mention that the horse genome was actually sequenced back in 2007 and widely reported at the time, although it was only published this week.

It is a useful genome to have though.

“Horses and humans suffer from similar illnesses, so identifying the genetic culprits in horses promises to deepen our knowledge of disease in both organisms,” says Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Uppsala University in Sweden (press release). “The horse genome sequence is a key enabling resource toward this goal.”

The equine sequence is roughly 2.7 billion letters long and is not dissimilar to our own. “Indeed, 17 horse chromosomes (53%) comprise material from a single human chromosome (in the dog, it is 29%),” the authors write.

The horse genome joins not only the pig, but also the chicken and the cow, with the sheep on the way. All together now: “Old Macdonald had a genome…”

Image: Twilight / courtesy of Doug Antczak, Baker Institute for Animal Health, College of Veterinary Medicine, Cornell University

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 06, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The cost of sequencing a human genome has dropped to just below $5,000. Well, sort of. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company Complete Genomics published a paper today describing its efforts to sequence three genomes at a materials cost of $4,400. Included in the trio is the genome of George Church, personal genomics evangelist and an adviser to the company, who has already posted the analysis of his data here.

Continue reading "Complete Genomics publishes a genome" »

Posted by Erika Check Hayden on November 05, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A new analysis of a dinosaur skull recovered from an English reservoir in 1910 has concluded it is the oldest-known relative of Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Initially named Megalosaurus bradleyi, the skull was later relabelled as Proceratosaurus.

“Although this specimen is still one of the most complete and best preserved theropod skulls from, and one of very few theropod skulls from the Middle Jurassic globally, it has received surprisingly little attention in recent literature,” write Oliver Rauthhut, Angela Milner and Scott Moore-Fay in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

To deal with this lack of attention, the researchers cleaned away rock from the fossil and subjected it to CT scans. Their conclusion: the 3-metre long beast was probably a 165-million-year old ancestor of the most iconic of dinosaurs.

“It was quite a surprise when our analysis showed we had the oldest known relative of T. rex,” says Milner, of London’s Natural History Museum (press release).

Image: NHM

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 04, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Many thanks to genome scientists for giving us tastier sausages, for according to the Telegraph’s food and drink section, the best thing about the recently unveiled pig genome is that it will lead us to better bangers.

The announcement was made from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, but the pig, a red-haired Duroc pig came from a farm at the University of Illinois, US.

"The pig is the ideal animal to look at lifestyle and health issues in the United States," the AP reports Larry Schook as saying. Schook, from the University of Illinois in Champaign, led the DNA sequencing project.

The 98% complete genome sequence will be valuable to agriculturalists looking to improve pig breeding practices, look at their immunity to certain diseases, and also help preserve species fo rare, endangered pigs. And it might also help create a swine flu vaccine – but only for pigs (Daily Mail).

The pig genome is particularly useful because our porcine friends are like us in many ways that may not be obvious to the naked eye; they have similar psychology, behaviour and nutritional needs to us says WA today. Except I bet pigs don’t eat sausages.

Image: Scott Bauer - USDA, ARS, IS Photo Unit

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on November 03, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Jane Qiu

Qian Xuesen, widely known as the father of China’s missile and space missile programme, died on 31 October at the age of 98.

A prominent rocket scientist who helped establish the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, Qian decided to return to China after being accused of being a communist and spy, but was detained for five years before being deported in 1955.

One year after his return, Qian established China's first ballistic missile programme, which led to the successful launch of the Dongfeng missile in 1964 and nuclear-weapon testing the following year. Qian's research has also led to the development of the Long March Rocket, which successfully launched Shenzhou V, China's manned spacecraft, in October 2003.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences has also reported the death of biophysicist Bei Shizhang, who died the age 107 on October 29. “As the founder, the first chief director and later honorary director of the Institute of Biophysics, CAS, he was considered ‘Father of Chinese Biophysics’,” the academy said in a statement.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 02, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier this month it looked like the UK government had abandoned plans to keep the DNA of innocent people on its massive police database.

The European Court of Human Rights has already said that data on innocent people should not be retained. Now, however, leaked emails indicate that the government will try to keep hold of their DNA for six years, says the Daily Mail. The previously abandoned position of the government was to keep DNA of innocents for 12 years (see: UK won't be able to store DNA data – 20 October, 2009).

It was also reported today that the profiles of 5.5 million people – over 10% of the population of England and Wales – are now on the database (Daily Telegraph). In addition, over 90,000 innocent people have had their DNA added to the database since that European Court ruling that this shouldn’t be happening (Guardian).

The UK government’s approach seems to be catching on too: the University of Akron in the US is now apparently requiring job applicants to be willing to supply a DNA sample (Inside Higher Ed).

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 29, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A single dose of gene therapy greatly improved the vision of 12 patients with a rare, inherited visual disorder. The best results were achieved in the youngest patients, including a 9-year-old boy named Corey Haas, who was considered legally blind before the treatment began and now has the same level of light sensitivity as his normal-sighted schoolmates.

The study "holds great promise for the future" and "is appealing because of its simplicity", Frans Cremers and Rob Collin, of the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in the Netherlands, wrote in a commentary accompanying the report, which was published online 24 October in the Lancet.

Leber's congenital amaurosis is an inherited eye disease characterized by severe degeneration of the retina and loss of vision in the first few months of life. The disease, which affects around 1 in 80,000 people, can be caused by mutations in 13 different genes. But all 12 of the patients in the Phase I study, led by researchers at researchers at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, suffered from a defective gene called RPE65, which codes for a vitamin A derivative that is essential for detecting light.

The researchers injected each patient's worse eye with a functional copy of the RPE65 gene inserted into an adenovirus vector. The investigators last year reported success with three adult patients (see 'Gene therapy treats blindness'), and now they've added an additional nine patients, including four children under the age of 11. These youngsters displayed the greatest visual recovery, presumably because their defective retinal cells did not yet have time to completely die off.

Continue reading "Gene fix helps blind boy see" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on October 26, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Butterflies did not mistakenly mate with worm-like animals to give rise to caterpillars, according to a new report that challenges previous claims to the contrary.

"It's a nutbar idea," says study author Michael Hart, an evolutionary biologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. "There's just nothing to it."

In August, the Proceedings of the National Academy (PNAS) published a paper online by Donald Williamson, a retired zoologist at the University of Liverpool, UK, arguing that at some point in the distant past a larva-less insect hybridized with a velvet worm, and the resulting descendants now develop successively through stages that resemble both parents. The study — which was 'communicated' by academy member Lynn Margulis, of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, via the soon-to-be-obsolete 'Track I' submission route, which allows academy members to handle the review of a colleague's manuscript — became embroiled in controversy after questions were raised about the peer review process (see 'Row at US journal widens').

The paper's print publication was suspended for more than a month, but it was ultimately given the green light in mid-October by the PNAS editorial board. The journal also plans to publish a short 'letter to the editor' by Gonzalo Giribet, an invertebrate zoologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a response from Williamson. In addition, PNAS today published a full-length counter-argument to Williamson's hypothesis.

Williamson's paper offered little direct evidence for hybridization other than physical resemblances between caterpillars and velvet worms. But he predicted that insects with caterpillar larvae should show genetic similarities to the worm-like invertebrates, and he called on genomicists to test his ideas. Now, two non-academy members — Hart and fellow evolutionary biologist Richard Grosberg, of the University of California, Davis — have taken Williamson to task and turned to published data on genome sizes and contents to rubbish his proposals.

Continue reading "No species mixing to make caterpillars" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on October 26, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The secret is out: Neanderthals and modern humans had sex, geneticist Svante Pääbo declared Sunday during a conference at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. But the jury's still out on whether these relations resulted in offsrping and, if so, whether those offspring contributed to humans today. (The Times)

Pääbo led the three-year project to sequence the Neanderthal genome at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany. The team completed the draft sequence in February, but the preliminary genetic analysis, announced at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago, was little more than a tease.

It seems Pääbo is continuing to be rather tight-lipped about the findings, disclosing few details to The Times, besides announcing that he's "sure that they had sex". Pääbo will publish his analysis of the entire Neanderthal genome "shortly", The Times reports.

Continue reading "Did Neandermen Roam the Earth?" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on October 26, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Direct-to-consumer genetic testing can count one more consumer — the director of the US National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins.

Collins announced today at a personalized medicine colloquium in Washington DC that he spat into a set of tubes and sent off his genetic material under a pseudonym to three of the leading personal genetic testing companies. He said that all the companies provided highly accurate genotyping, but with substantial differences in the information that was revealed and the interpretations provided — similar to the conclusions reached by Collins's former human genome sequencing rival, Craig Venter, in a recent opinion article in Nature.

On a more personal level, Collins discovered that he carries two copies of the most common risk factor of type II diabetes. Collins, whose laboratory investigates the underlying genetic basis of adult-onset diabetes, said he was "surprised" by these findings since his family has no history of the disease. Upon learning the test results, Collins got off his Harley-Davidson and instigated a regular exercise regime. The svelter NIH director said he has now lost 20 pounds.

Official NIH photos from before and after Collins became director. Check out those gaunt cheeks!

Posted by Elie Dolgin on October 26, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine, Policy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A new understanding of one of nature’s most complicated eyes could lead improvements in a huge range of modern electronic devices, according to a paper published in Nature Photonics.

Nicholas Roberts, of the University of Bristol, and colleagues have worked out how the ‘quarter-wave plates’ in the eyes of mantis shrimp work.

As you may have guessed, a quarter-wave plate rotates the plane of polarization of a light wave by a quarter. Crucially, they can convert between linearly polarized light and circularly polarized light, something that makes them useful for DVD players, CD players, and camera filters.

“Our work reveals for the first time the unique design and mechanism of the quarter-wave plate in the mantis shrimp’s eye,” says Roberts (press release). “It really is exceptional, outperforming anything we humans have so far been able to create.”

Shrimp eyes use cleverly designed cell membranes rolled into collections of tubes to make their quarter wave plates and to help them see polarized light (as well as twelve colours as opposed to human eyes, which have a rather paltry three colour palette), the authors report.

Study author Justin Marshall of the University of Queensland says shrimp also reflect circular polarized light off their bodies.

“They have a cuticle on their skin that reflects it,” he told ABC. “They’re talking to each other with a secret light channel.”

Now we’re closer to understanding how shrimp eyes work, we may be able to use their advanced optics to make better electronics, using liquid crystals to mimic them, say the authors.

This is undoubtedly very cool science, but won’t we just be downloading our movies and games by the time they get this working for DVDs?

Image mantis shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus) / Roy Caldwell.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 26, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Tarantulas don’t make silk with their feet, according to a new paper which refutes previous research.

In 2006, Stanislav Gorb of the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart, and his colleagues wrote in Nature that zebra tarantulas (Aphonopelma seemanni) could secrete silk from their feet. This, they argued, helps them climb smooth vertical surfaces and “avoid catastrophic falls”. The finding played well with the media.

Now Fernando Perez-Miles, of the Universidad de la República in Uruguay, and colleagues may have disproved this. They took four zebra tarantulas and used paraffin to seal their spinnerets – the abdominal structures spiders make silk with. After 72 hours they found no silk at all in the containers they were keeping the spiders in, they write in Nature.

They also say that the spinneret structures detailed by Gorb on spiders’ feet are actually sensory structures.

“Tarantulas entangle silk threads from the spinnerets with their tarsi. They often use hind legs to entangle silk, but we also observed A. seemanni entangling with their other legs. This behaviour might explain the presence of the thread footprints photographed by Gorb et al.” write the authors.

However Gorb and his team maintain that spiders may be producing foot-silk. Firstly they argue that the silk in question is laid down in parallel tracks, implying it is not a secondary deposition. Additionally they say that examination of this silk shows a broad area at the beginning of the fibre that could be where it was an initial fluid. If the silk had come from an abdominal organ fluid phases would be lost in transference to the feet, they argue.

“We remain satisfied that the most plausible explanation for our observations is the existence of tarsal-silk-producing structures scattered within the setae on tarantula tarsi,” says their response.

Image: tarantula entangling a silk thread with its hind leg, from Perez-Miles et al.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 22, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The question of why most animals have sex with other animals is answered today by a paper published in Nature (no snickering at the back).

This issue isn’t as simple as you might think. The real problem is that men are actually rubbish, note the paper’s authors Levi Morran, Michelle Parmenter and Patrick Phillips, who all work at the University of Oregon, Eugene.

Males “do not directly contribute offspring”, they say, so animals that self-fertilize should have numerical advantage over their sexually reproducing relatives. On the flip side reproducing sexually does mean you avoid inbreeding and you can adapt faster to environmental changes.

To get a better understanding of this, the researchers genetically tweaked C. elegans worms to be either sexually reproducing hermaphrodites (‘outcrossing’) or ‘selfing’ animals. They then exposed these animals to a chemical that upped their mutation rate. They also tested how well they adapted to a nasty bacterial pathogen.

Selfing animals showed a decline in fitness and were less good at adapting to the pathogen. The bottom line: animals that don’t do it on their own did better when forced to mutate or adapt to a new environment.

“Many scientists have argued that outcrossing has evolved to avoid the genetic consequences of inbreeding, while others have emphasized the role that outcrossing plays in generating the genetic variation necessary for evolutionary change,” says Morran (press release). “Our work shows that both of these factors are important.”

Image: hermaphrodite nematode C. elegans / Patrick Phillips, University of Oregon

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 22, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The UK must grow GM crops to avoid food shortages in the future, a report from the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences, is expected to say (Telegraph).

The study was commission in July 2008 in response to a prediction from the United Nations that world food production would need to double by 2050 to sustain a global population expected to reach nine billion.

Previous plans to grow GM crops commercially in the UK were withdrawn at the beginning of the decade after protests from green groups and consumers’ rejection of the technology.

The Telegraph says that the report, which is due to be published this week, examines several options to increase crops yields in the UK and around the world, including growing GM crops.

A source told the Sunday Telegraph, “The report will say the right GM crops should be used in the future to alleviate food shortages. This study is going to move the debate forward. The government will have to take notice of this.”

But opponents of GM crops told the Telegraph, “There is no scientific evidence that GM produces huge yields.”

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on October 19, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Earth, environment & ecology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Bird of paradise plant seed Credit: Annie Cavanaugh, Wellcome Images

From captivating cancer cells to stunning sensory nerve fibres, the winners reveal "the ability of the picture to communicate the wonder and fascination of science", according to the Wellcome Trust's press release.

To view all the selected images, head over to the Wellcome Collection in London before Spring 2010, or just click through the Image Awards Website, which details how the images were captured and why they were tapped by the judges.

Over at the BBC, there's also a video of Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, discussing his top three picks.

Summer plankton
Credit: Spike Walker, Wellcome Images

Mouse liver with blood cells
Credit: EM Unit, UCL Medical School, Royal Free Campus, Wellcome Images

Posted by Elie Dolgin on October 16, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Brendan Maher

Yesterday, Nature published a map of human DNA methylation at singe base pair resolution, basically the precise location of millions of methyl groups hanging on the cytosine bases in the genome.

For the ‘omics’ lovers, this is the methylome, a subset of the epigenome which presumably also includes the extent of different modifications made to histone proteins and the attachment of other molecules known to influence gene expression.

No doubt journalists around the world had a difficult time wrapping their nut grafs around this one.

Defining what makes something “epigenetic” has been a prickly practice (one briefly outlined in a Nature news feature last year).

Purists say that it has to do with modifications to gene expression that do not involve mutation but are inherited at least from cell to cell during division,if not through sexual reproduction as well. The NIH, which funded the current work, defines it a bit more loosely, not tying the modifications down to inheritance.

Metaphors are helpful in explaining the importance of the epigenome, but they can be equally sticky.

Continue reading "On methylome metaphors" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 15, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

A nearly totally vegetarian spider has been discovered in a remarkable ecological niche in Central America.

While most spiders dine on tasty insects and the like, the new species lives on acacia shrubs. These provide shelter and food for ants that in turn protect them from predators, in theory at least.

The new spider – named Bagheera kiplingi after the panther in the Jungle Book – lives on the plants, eating the nectar produced for the ants and the leaf tips that produce it.

It is not totally veggie, as it occasionally snacks on ant larvae and flies that try to dine on the nectar. However it is, say its discoverers, “the first report of a spider that feeds primarily and deliberately on plants”.

The spider was discovered independently by two research teams; Eric Olson, of Brandeis University in Massachusetts, found it in Costa Rica in 2001 and Christopher Meehan, of Villanova University, Pennsylvania, found it in Mexico in 2007.

“What surprised us most about discovering this spider's extraordinary ecology was to find it on the ant-acacias,” says Robert Curry, also of Villanova University. (press release).

“This well-known mutualism has been studied by tropical ecologists for nearly 50 years, yet the spider's role was not noticed until Olson's discovery in 2001. We were lucky to find in Mexico an area where the spider is both exceptionally abundant and even more herbivorous than in Costa Rica.”

This is, as the comment piece from Duncan Jackson, of the University of Ulster in the UK, running alongside the paper in Current Biology notes remarkable for a number of reasons:

This is wholly remarkable, because all other known spiders are carnivorous predators, and unlike most other nutritional mutualism exploiters, jumping spiders are specialized hunters rather than generalized foragers.
...
It is truly remarkable that a spider should thrive on a vegetarian diet, because all spiders are constrained by their narrow gut, specialized mandibles and a solids filtration system to consume a liquid diet.
...
It seems that the transition from hunter to gatherer in this uniquely vegetarian spider has facilitated a suite of additional behavioural changes which might suggest an alternative route to sociality. One wonders how many more surprises await us in this remarkable system.

Image: adult female Bagheera kiplingi eats Beltian body harvested from ant-acacia / R. L. Curry

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 13, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Practicing a task like juggling that requires you to focus your vision and your movement actually increases the amount of white matter in your noggin.

This is the result of research from the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain, UK. They used a technique known as diffusion MRI to test for changes in the brain before and after a group of 24 young people learned to juggle over six weeks, and the paper is published in Nature Neuroscience.

Changes in grey matter of the brain had already been seen in similar studies, but the white matter is the stuff that matters – it passes the information between bits of grey matter. Increases in white matter are a previously unobserved phenomena, the authors claim. In their study, white matter increased by 5% after the juggling novices had mastered their task.

Juggling isn’t important other than to illustrate the point Heidi Johansen-Berg, who led the team, tells the BBC, the changes they see might apply to any other task that needs to be learned. The AFP suggest the work proves that juggling rewires the brain and the excitement has spread to the British tabloids, (Daily Mirror) which are advocating juggling to increase brain power, which isn’t necessarily the message to take from the study, rather that white matter changes were spotted.

Anyway, I'm off to join the circus.

Image: Photo by dpadua via Flickr under creative commons.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on October 12, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Computer giant IBM is the latest company to say it will try to build a DNA sequencing machine. IBM appears to be years behind other companies that are taking similar approaches, but the company's announcement has caused quite a stir among tech journalists.

PC World says that IBM will "expand the life span of humans," while the New York Times' John Markoff predicts that the company will cut the cost of DNA sequencing to under $100, "making a personal genome cheaper than a ticket to a Broadway play."

Sequencing a whole human genome currently costs tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum.

Continue reading "IBM dips toe into DNA sequencing; tech press swoons" »

Posted by Erika Check Hayden on October 06, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Animal-human hybrid embryo research has been “driven out of Britain”, according to the front page of today’s Independent. However, one of the scientists involved has already cast doubt on the paper’s story.

The paper claims that “all research involving the controversial creation of animal-human ‘hybrid’ embryos has been refused funding in Britain”. It also says that “every one of the three projects to develop embryonic stem cells from cloned embryos created by fusing human cells with animal eggs has now been abandoned”.

Earlier this year the UK bodies responsible for funding (or not funding) such research were forced to deny that moral objections played a part in the rejection of funding applications (see: Moral objections to hybrid embryo research claims rejected).

The three holders of licences for animal-human hybrids in the UK were Stephen Minger, Lyle Armstrong, and Justin St John.

Minger recently departed King’s College London to work in industry (see: Top scientist’s industry move heralds stem-cell shift). When this issue reared its head earlier this year Minger claimed he was misinterpreted by the Independent, which claimed he suggested moral factors were an issue in funding rejections.

Armstrong, says the Independent, has departed Newcastle University for Spain (although no-one at the university’s Institute for Human Genetics was immediately available to confirm this).

Finally, and the apparent trigger for the story, Justin St John is leaving the UK for Australia. In a statement distributed by the Science Media Centre, St John says:

The MRC [Medical Research Council] funded me to make mouse-pig hybrids and I am grateful to them for their support for my work. Hybrid work will continue in the UK. However my hybrid work was a spin off from my main research interest which I will be pursuing at Monash [University in Australia].

Both the Medical Research Council and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council also released statements defending their use of peer-review as the best way to approve or reject grant applications. “Having a HFEA licence and legislative approval to conduct certain research does not give an area special treatment,” said Colin Miles, BBSRC’s Head of Integrative and Systems Biology.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 05, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nature's full news story on this prize is now live: Chromosome protection scoops Nobel

The prize committee notes:

The long, thread-like DNA molecules that carry our genes are packed into chromosomes, the telomeres being the caps on their ends. Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack Szostak discovered that a unique DNA sequence in the telomeres protects the chromosomes from degradation. Carol Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn identified telomerase, the enzyme that makes telomere DNA. These discoveries explained how the ends of the chromosomes are protected by the telomeres and that they are built by telomerase.

The work of these three, says the prize committee, has added a “new dimension” to our understanding of cells and disease and provided a new avenue for treatments (more here).

The committee references three papers for this newly-Nobel winning work: two in Cell and one in Nature.

Congratulations to all, and to the University of California, San Francisco, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Harvard Medical School [corrected 10/5] in Massachusetts which all now have one more laureate on their staff.

This year’s Physiology or Medicine prize is the 100th ever awarded. A full news story on this prize will appear shortly on Nature News. Tune in tomorrow for the physics prize.

The scores so far:

By country of residence
USA - 3

By country of birth
USA – 1
UK – 1
Australia – 1

By journal paper
Cell – 2
Nature – 1

See also
Elizabeth Blackburn - Nature Medicine 7, 520 (2001)

Image top: Alfred Nobel, via wikipedia
Image lower, left to right: Blackburn, Greider, Szostak all by Gerbil, Licensed by Attribution Share Alike 3.0

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 05, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Last night Cambridge’s clown school gave the world’s best and brightest the awards they deserved. Harvard University hosted its 19th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, where its Annals of Improbable Research recognized the usual combination of mad scientists and asinine leaders.

Pulling in the biology prize was a Japanese team that discovered pandas are more than just cuddly tax dollar vacuums — their poop packs a potent punch. The group isolated bacteria in panda feces that can reduce kitchen waste by more than 90 percent in mass. Good news, given that pandas produce about 40 pounds of poop a day — and as one might expect, it doesn’t stink.

The Ig Nobel prizes also continued their fascination with skivvies. Back in 2001 the biology prize went to the inventor of panties that filter out flatulence with a replaceable charcoal filter, and this year the public health prize went to the inventors of a bra that can be “quickly converted into a pair of gas masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander” — in this case that needy bystander was Wolfgang Ketterle, 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Continue reading "Panda poop, panties and more at the Ig Nobels" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on October 02, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Earth, environment & ecology, Financial Crisis, Health and medicine, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Many Tyrannosaurus rex may have been laid low by a single celled parasite that is still taking down modern birds.

Many tyrannosaurid fossils have multiple smooth holes in their mandibles. These have generally been attributed to either bacterial bone infection or bite wounds.

Now a study published in PLOS One instead points the finger at the trichomonosis parasite. By comparing the lesions seen in fossil dinos to those caused by modern bird maladies and crocodile pox the research team concludes tyrannosaurs were commonly infected with a trichomonas type protozoa.

The population probably became infected through consumption of infected prey, or even through cannibalism, write Ewan Wolff, of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and colleagues.

Perhaps the most famous victim may have been ‘Sue’, the huge T. rex now on display at the Field Museum in Chicago. “The lesions we observe on Sue suggest a very advanced stage of the disease and may even have been the cause of her demise,” says Wolff (press release).

“It is a distinct possibility as it would have made feeding incredibly difficult. You have to have a viable pharynx. Without that, you won't make it for very long, no matter how powerful you are.”

Field Museum palaeontologist Peter Makovicky told the Chicago Tribune. “It ... reinforces what I and many others thought, that [the jawbone holes] were the result of some kind of pathogen.

He adds, “The problem with ... making a diagnosis of an animal that old is that we know she had many things going wrong with her health. [Sue] was old and beat up, with a large lesion on her left leg that may have slowed her. She could have died simply of old age or had been so weakened by age or injury that some other disease took over.”

Image: artist’s impression of a T. rex suffering from a trichomonosis / Chris Glen, University of Queensland

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 30, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The US Food and Drug Administration admitted yesterday that political influence led to the agency's decision last year to approve a device to repair damaged knees against the recommendation of its own scientists.

Since 2006, the FDA's scientific reviewers have twice turned down applications for the device, known as Menaflex and manufactured by ReGen Biologics of Hackensack, New Jersey, according to an FDA report. The company did not show "that patients who received the device experienced any benefit", one scientist wrote in a rejection letter. (AP)

But following persistent lobbying from four New Jersey Democratic congressmen — Senators Robert Menendez and Frank R. Lautenberg and Representatives Frank Pallone Jr and Steven R. Rothman — FDA officials overruled the scientists' advice and granted approval for the US$3,000 knee patch last December. All four legislators received significant campaign contributions from ReGen; for example, Rothman alone took in US$13,300 last year, according to OpenSecrets.org.

The director of the FDA's device division who gave the go-ahead, Daniel Schultz, resigned last month following numerous safety concerns and other scandals. (Reuters)

Continue reading "FDA's review process knee-deep in trouble" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on September 25, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With less than two weeks to go until the Nobel Prize winners are announced, the soothsayers at Thomson Reuters have rubbed their crystal balls and come up with a shortlist of favourites.

The contenders, as predicted by Thomson Reuters' citation analyst David Pendlebury, are based on the number of citations and high-impact papers published in Nobel-worthy fields of study. Since 2002, 15 'citation' Laureates have gone on to win Nobel Prizes, seven of which were tapped in the same year as their triumph, including last year’s chemistry champ, Roger Tsien of the University of California, San Diego.

This year’s frontrunners for physiology or medicine include the codiscoverers of telomeres, the repetitive DNA add-ons at the ends of chromosomes that have been linked to ageing and cancer as they shrink, the researchers who worked out cellular membrane trafficking, and the Japanese researcher who showed that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) could track oxygen flow, making real-time brain scans and functional MRI possible.

Continue reading "Nobel nod" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on September 24, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Health and medicine, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Hydrolagus melanophasma is a slippery customer. It is a new species, in that scientists identified it for the first time this month, but it is also an old species, probably branching off from modern sharks 400 million years ago, and collected in jars by museums since the 1960s, writes National Geographic News.

And it was not easy to classify. “They have some shark characteristics and they have some that are very non-shark,” Doug Long of the California Academy of Sciences and an author on the Zootaxa article classifying the species told Wired News. The creature flaps its fins like a ray, is shaped more like a modern shark, and the males feature what Wired News calls a "most intriguing" retractable sexual organ dangling from its head. In fact, the researchers classified it as a member of the chimera order, also known as ghost sharks.

Continue reading "Ghostly shark no longer dead to science" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen on September 23, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted for Monya Baker from The Niche

The Maryland company NeuralStem has the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s permission to test its spinal cord stem cells in twelve patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The approval comes a month after the FDA placed Geron’s planned clinical trial on hold for a second time. NeuralStem’s trial had also previously been placed on hold by the FDA in February before receiving the go-ahead in September.

Though both trials involve placing cells into the spinal cord, NeuralStem’s product is made of cultured neural stem cells derived from a single 8-week fetus; Geron’s product, intended to treat spinal cord injury, is derived from embryonic stem cells that have been differentiated into precursors of neuron-support cells.

“This is certainly the first stem-cell approach for ALS,” says Lucie Bruijn, a scientist at the ALS Association, a patient group that also funds relevant research. Most other approaches for treating ALS are small molecule drugs, she says, and she’s not aware of other cell therapy or other invasive approaches entering human testing in the near future.

Continue reading "FDA green lights stem-cell clinical trial for Lou Gehrig’s disease" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen on September 22, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This giant squid, found by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service scientists during a sperm whale diet study on 30 July, measured 5.9 metres and weighed in at 46.7 kg according to a Reuters report.

See the full post for another photo...

Continue reading "One that didn't get away: giant squid found in Gulf of Mexico" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen on September 22, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The National Institutes of Health started accepting applications today to evaluate which human embryonic stem cells will be eligible for federal dollars.

A panel of nine scientists, lawyers and ethicists — led by Jeffrey Botkin of the University of Utah — will scrutinize submissions to ensure that they meet the new requirements for informed consent from embryo donors. The working group's "expertise and sound judgment will help NIH move forward in this important effort," NIH director Francis Collins, who will have the final say on the eligibility of particular lines, said in a statement.

The panel will review cell lines made before the guidelines went into effect on 7 July. Fundable lines must be derived from leftover embryos that were created solely for assisted reproduction and donated voluntarily with no financial incentives.

"We're open for business in a new era," Lana Skirboll, director of policy at NIH, told Nature. The working group has not yet appraised any cell lines — including the 21 lines approved under former President George W. Bush, which will need to be reassessed — and will start considering particular cells after scientists submit their petitions on the NIH website. "The speed at which this moves is really in the hands of the scientific community at this point," she said.

Having a mechanism in place to expand the number of eligible cell lines "is what we've been working toward for a very long time," said M. William Lensch, a stem cell researcher at Children's Hospital Boston and the Harvard Medical School, who expects to start submitting requests "sooner rather than later."

Image: James Thomson, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Posted by Elie Dolgin on September 21, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A Yale University animal technician was charged yesterday with murdering the 24-year-old pharmacology graduate student Annie Le, whose body was found behind a wall of an off-campus research facility on Sunday.

The suspect, Raymond Clark III, had been a full-time lab technician since he graduated from high school in 2004, first working in the washing centre and then caring for mice and other animals. In a statement, Yale president Richard Levin said that "nothing in the history of [Clark's] employment at the University gave an indication that his involvement in such a crime might be possible."

But a team leader in the Amistad Street building where Clark worked said otherwise. He told the New York Times that several researchers complained last year to Clark's supervisor that he was rude and overly critical of others. "Everyone enforces rules, but he enforced them in an officious manner," the anonymous man said. Other Yale workers called Clark a "control freak," according to the Associated Press.

Continue reading "Lab tech arrested for Yale murder" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on September 18, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Kerri Smith

Well, not quite red herrings, but Atlantic salmon. Allow me to explain. Reported on the Neuroskeptic and Neurolaw blogs this week is a study that aimed to demonstrate the risks of finding false positives in brain scanning studies - correlations that aren't really there.

A group of scientists led by Craig Bennett at the University of California at Santa Barbara conducted their study with an unusual participant. From their Methods section:
"Subject: One mature Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) participated in the fMRI study. The salmon was approximately 18 inches long, weighed 3.8 lbs, and was not alive at the time of scanning." Warning: below the fold it gets a bit fishy.

Continue reading "Study warns of red herrings in brain scan data" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen on September 18, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

T. Rex's notoriously massive head, sharp teeth and piddly diddly arms first evolved in a runty ancestor one hundredth its size, paleontologists reported in Science yesterday. The nine-foot-long Raptorex kriegsteini lived about 35 million years before its multi-ton descendant, but already bore many of its hallmark features.

The findings come as a surprise for paleontologists, who thought these features evolved as the tyrannosaurids grew to become the colossal beasts we see in the movies — the limbs withering as the head and body expanded. Raptorex throws this idea a pretty nasty curve ball, suggesting that the same body plan could have withstood two orders of magnitude of growth.

The Chicago Tribune give some juicy details of the fossil's shady legal history: The specimen was smuggled out of a fossil field in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region in northern China, then carted off to an "illegal international black market for fossils." A Massachusetts eye surgeon and amateur paleontologist named Henry Kriegstein (hence the fossil's name) later purchased it (legally) for "tens of thousands of dollars, but well below $100,000", he told the Tribune.

Continue reading "Tiny T Rex ancestor still pretty scary" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on September 18, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The makers of Creation, a British film about the life of Charles Darwin, have attracted as much attention for saying it won't be shown in the US as they might have hoped to get from a creationist protest at a hypothetical US premiere. Today, Nature hosted a screening of the film at the Science Museum in London with members of the production team.

The film, which opened the Toronto Film Festival over the weekend, premiered in the UK Sunday. It was adapted from the book Annie's Box, a novel by Randal Keynes, Darwin's great-great-grandson, about Darwin's personal life. But rumors that it won't reach the US have set off a cascade of debate, ranging from blaming religious conservatism to simply guessing that the film wouldn't sell. The Daily Telegraph led Friday with a quote from the film's producer, Jeremy Thomas: "It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it's because of what the film is about."

Continue reading "Creating a controversy" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen on September 16, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Maori legends told of a giant predatory bird called the Te Hokioi, whose wingspan approached the length of a full-grown man and whose prey included human beings. Now Kiwi scientists are adding to the legend by claiming that a skeleton found in the 1870s shares some of the legendary bird's traits.

"We don't think it carried off men and women but it could well have carried off children," says Paul Scofield, who along with colleagues at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch published a report in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology indicating that the extinct Harpagornis moorei swiftly evolved wings 3 metres across and weighed in at 18 kilograms, twice the size of today's largest living eagle, soon after its arrival on New Zealand's South Island.

Continue reading "Kiwi scientists add to Maori man-eating bird legend" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen on September 15, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A blind listening test at a forestry conference suggests that foresters, at least, prefer a modern violin made from fungus-treated wood to an original Stradivarius.

Last year Francis Schwarze of the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research in St Gallen published results suggesting that treating wood with fungus might help recreate the unusually low density that prevailed when Antonio Stradivari carved his legendary instruments.
(Nature News, 16 June 2008)

Schwarze teamed up with luthiers (violin-makers) to build violins with the treated wood, along with some control copies made from untreated wood. At a blind competition in the German city of Osnabrück on 1 September this year, 180 attendees of a German forestry conference (Osnabrücker Baumpflegetagen) rated the test violins and an original Stradivarius played by British violinist Matthew Trusler (World Radio Switzerland, 1 September 2009). One of the fungus-treated violins, called "Opus 58" garnered 90 votes for the best sound, with the Strad second at 39, according to a press release.

Blind violin identification is notoriously difficult: In a BBC test in 1974, experts were only able to correctly identify 2 of 4 instruments, and confused a modern instrument with a Stradivarius. Schwarze noted that the fungus treatment might make violins which sound like Strads, at least to foresters, for as little as 25,000 Swiss francs (World Radio Service, 10 September 2009).

Photo: The 5 violins in the competition. By Egmont Seiler.

Posted by Lucas Laursen on September 15, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the first researchers to clone animals and another who first reprogrammed skin into stem cells have been awarded the 2009 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award — a $250,000 accolade that is often seen as a prelude to a Nobel Prize.

John Gurdon, a developmental biologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, was the first to show that the vast majority of the body's cells retain the ability to become any other cell type even after they have committed to a particular developmental fate. In 1962, Gurdon, then at Oxford University, transferred the nucleus of an adult intestinal cell into a hollowed out egg cell of the South African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, to create the first cloned animal. This work paved the way for the cloning of other animals including Dolly the sheep by the technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer.

More than four decades later, Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan and the Gladstone Institute in San Francisco, California, showed that the developmental clock could be turned back on cells even without the use of eggs. In 2006, Yamanaka introduced four genes — which have come to be known as the "Yamanaka factors" — into mouse skin cells to transform them into induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, which are almost indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells. A year later, Yamanaka achieved the same feat in human cells.

Continue reading "Stem cell pioneers take home Lasker" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on September 14, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is the keystone text for evolutionary theory; now you can see how the book itself evolved, thanks to Ben Fry.

Fry is the director of information design company Seed Visualization and he has constructed a rather wonderful graphic that shows the changes in the book over its six editions.

“We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin's theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished,” writes Fry. “In fact, Darwin's On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime.”

Fry’s other scientific information design projects include a redesign of genetic code diagrams and illustrations of the relationships between different genomes. He was also behind the rather cool Nature HapMap cover.

His Traces graphic allows to you not just to watch the changes accumulate as time passes – and editions are published – but also to see where words and passages have been added into the text (image left).

“The idea that we can actually see change over time in a person’s thinking is fascinating,” says Fry. “Darwin scholars are of course familiar with this story, but here we can view it directly, both on a macro-level as it animates, or word-by-word as we examine pieces of the text more closely.”

Traces uses text from The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, run by John van Wyhe.

Hat tip: Flowing data

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 07, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Biogen Idec boardroom battle continues to rage on. Mere months after billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn succeeded in getting two of his endorsed directors elected to the board, two of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company's scientific directors have resigned. In July, Phillip Sharp, a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the co-founder of Biogen, relinquished his spot on the board after serving for 27 years. And last month, Cecil Pickett, president of research and development, announced that he would retire from both his full-time day job and the board on 5 October. Both men were not due to step down until 2011.

Nature spoke with Pickett about his decision to resign prematurely. (Sharp declined to be interviewed.)

Did Carl Icahn's attempted takeover of the board influence your decision to retire early?

Not really, the plan all along was just a four-year tenure. That's how I went into it. I cut my job short because I just thought I had accomplished everything I could in the timeframe I had actually given it. We did a lot to build up the mid-stage pipeline and the small molecule discovery efforts, we did some licensing deals, and I did some significant recruiting where there were some weak spots. And given all the flux in the industry I thought it might be a good time to go out and recruit my successor.

Continue reading "Biogen Idec R&D head talks" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on September 02, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from The Niche

Differentiated human cells have been reprogrammed to an embryonic-like state with the addition of only one gene, rather than the standard four. The research, published in Nature, should advance techniques for the efficient production of high-quality patient-specific stem cells.

The ability to make induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells using cells from specific patients could enable unprecedented new ways to study disease and also ease the development of cell therapies. However, such applications have been stymied in part because making induced pluripotent stem cells efficiently requires the introduction of pluripotency genes, which are typically inserted at random sites throughout the genome. This unwanted source of variation stymies rigorous comparisons between cells, and could make them behave in unpredictable, dangerous ways if used for cell therapies. Several techniques to make cells without permanent insertion of the genes have been reported, including some that do not use genetic material at all.

See: Human iPS cells with no genetic integration; Virus free pluripotency for human cells; Integration-free iPS cells; Reprogramming to pluripotency without genetic engineering; Generation of human induced pluripotent stem cells by direct delivery of reprogramming proteins

However, researchers are eager for additional, ‘gentler’ ways to reprogram cells, and one possibility would be starting with cells that are more prone to reprogramming. Evidence in mice suggests that the tissue of origin affects how often and how well differentiated cells reprogram. See: Cell origin and variation in induced pluripotent stem cell lines; Stomach and liver cells reprogrammed

Scholer and colleagues reasoned that neural cells would be a good candidate, since these cells already express high levels of three of the four standard pluripotency factors (Sox2, Klf4 and c-myc). The team had previously shown that this strategy worked in mice. The researchers used viruses to insert copies of the fourth pluripotency factor, Oct4, into the cells. This produced reprogrammed cells that passed all standard tests of pluripotency.

The current study reprogrammed neural stem cells from human fetal tissue. While adult tissues tend to be more difficult to reprogram, and brain biopsies are difficult to obtain, Scholer and colleagues say they are already working out practical solutions. More-accessble cells, such as those found in dental pulp, might also be good candidates.

Posted on behalf of Monya Baker

Posted by Mark Peplow on August 28, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The culprit responsible for delaying the first-ever clinical trial involving human embryonic stem cells has been identified: microscopic spinal cysts.

Last week, the US Food and Drug Administration put the brakes on Geron Corp's clinical trial in spinal cord injury because of just-completed animal studies that raised red flags. The Menlo, California-based biotech company announced Thursday that the animals developed microscopic cysts in the injury site. These lumps, however, did not spread to other parts of the body and none of the animals developed tumours. A second concluded study showed no cysts in spinal cord injured rats, according to a Geron press release.

“I think it provides people with a reasonable explanation,” said Stephen Brozak, an analyst with WBB Securities LLC in Westfield, New Jersey. “Everybody was afraid of the T- word, teratomas, and it clearly wasn’t that.” (Bloomberg)

Analysts rejoiced at the news. Geron shares rose more than 3% yesterday, closing higher than any day since the clinical hold was announced.

Geron is now working with the FDA to relaunch the stalled trials, the company said. No date was set.

Posted by Elie Dolgin on August 28, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Women with high levels of testosterone are more likely to make risky financial decisions, according to research published this week. The finding, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is another twist to the controversy over ‘traders’ testosterone’.

Women are generally more risk averse than men, says Dario Maestripieri, of the University of Chicago. Maestripieri’s team had 550 MBA students play financial computer games to determine how risky their behaviour was. They also measured the students’ levels of testosterone.

Higher levels of testosterone meant less aversion to risk in women, but not in men, they found. In addition, and perhaps unsurprisingly, testosterone levels and risk aversion appeared to predict career choice with those high in the former and low in the latter being more likely to choose risky careers in finance.

“This is the first study showing that gender differences in financial risk aversion have a biological basis, and that differences in testosterone levels between individuals can affect important aspects of economic behaviour and career decisions,” says Maestripieri (press release).

Previous research has linked testosterone levels to success in trading (see: The testosterone of trading). However, any female traders reading this should be dissuaded from artificially boosting their testosterone levels to compete in the markets; another study in women found that raising their levels of testosterone made no difference to how risky their behaviour was (see: Testosterone boost doesn't fuel risky behaviour in women).

Some papers have inevitably managed to make this research about sex, given testosterone's links to sex drive, and are suggesting that women who are risky may also be risqué.

When published, the PNAS article will be available here.

Image: punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 25, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Financial Crisis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After almost three-and-a-half years, the trial of Korean stem-cell researcher Woo Suk Hwang may be drawing to a close.

In two seminal papers published in Science in 2004 and 2005, Hwang claimed to have created patient-specific embryonic stem cells using cloning techniques. In January 2006, a committee at Seoul National University, where Hwang held a post, found that the results were all fabricated.

On 24 August this year, in a final evidence hearing, prosecutors requested a four-year prison term for Hwang, who is charged with fraud, embezzlement of state funds and violation of the country’s bioethics law. Hwang has continually claimed he was duped.

Korean media report that the court is expected to hand down a decision in mid-October.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 24, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Mico Tatalovic

That you can extract ink from a 150 million old squid-like fossil and still use it to draw is pretty cool and so it caused a bit of a media frenzy this week.

Phil Wilby, a researcher at the British Geological Survey who is behind the discovery of the fossil and the subsequent drawing, ground the solidified, black ink from a fossil of an ancient squid like animal (Belemnotheutis antiquus) and then mixed it with ammonia to create a paint then used to draw a picture of the animal. This might suggest that the ancient ink has similar properties to modern ink, something that awaits confirmation from Yale University in America where it was sent for an in-depth chemical analysis, after which the results will be published.

Wilby told Nature that “fossil cephalopod ink has been found in even older specimens (more than 300 million years old) and, counter intuitively, appears to be amongst the most frequently fossilised soft tissues.”

Continue reading "Drawing with ancient ink" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 19, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross posted for Monya Baker from The Niche, Nature's stem cell blog

Six months after giving it the green light, the US Food and Drug Administration has told Geron to put plans for a clinical trial in spinal cord injury on hold. The company has differentiated embryonic stem cells into precursors of cells known as oligodendrocytes, which help keep neurons alive. Geron hopes this cell product could promote healing in people who have recently severed their spinal cords.

In a press release, Geron said that the hold was placed after the company submitted data on animal studies done to support delivery of increased doses of its cell product and on animal studies applying the cell product to other neurodegenerative diseases. (See the story from the San Jose Mercury News; here’s the Nature story when trial won approval)

I asked Evan Snyder, who directs the stem cell program at the Burnham Institute and is not privy to the confidential information, to speculate what might have been in the preclinical data that prompted teh FDA's action. It’s possible that the FDA just wanted more time to review newly submitted data, he said. Or on the other end of the extreme perhaps some sort of tumour or adverse reaction had been observed in the animals. Most likely, he thought, given that the company is trying to make larger doses of the cells, is that undifferentiated or non-neural cells have been observed in the cell product.

Clinical holds are not unusual particularly for innovative therapies. The FDA issued a clinical hold for NeuralStem in February on a trial in Lou Gehrig’s disease (the company uses neural stem cells derived from fetal cells)

At a large FDA advisory committee meeting in April last year, experts discussed the risks and benefits of products derived from embryonic stem cells. They were particularly concerned about uncontrolled cell growth. Even if the cells are not cancerous, tumours in the contained spaces of the brain and spinal cord could be devastating. Committee members were particularly concerned for diseases that are debilitating but not immediately deadly, since adverse events caused by experimental procedures could mean that people with years to live die early or end up suffering more. Patient advocates protested that they should be allowed to decide whether to take that risk.

Previous posts
Overview of FDA meeting (includes links to transcripts)
Nitty-gritty questions for making safe products

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 19, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a hub -- of scientific commercialization. Cellular Dynamics International (CDI), a Madison, Wisconsin-based company founded by stem cell pioneer James Thomson, announced this week that it has recruited two of the world's most prominent biologists to its scientific advisory board: genomics guru George Church and systems biology trailblazer Leroy Hood. Church and Hood are not generally known for an interest in the fast-moving field of stem cell research, but they are jumping on-board the personalized medicine bandwagon.

“Stem cells have the potential to transform 21st century medicine -- perhaps in a manner similar to antibiotics in the 20th century,” said Hood, president of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, in a statement.

“The commercial opportunity associated with human iPS cells is rapidly becoming complementary and/or competitive,” said Harvard University's Church in a statement.

Continue reading "A dynamic trio" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on August 14, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The genomics blogosphere is abuzz over allegations that a purchasing decision of next-generation sequencing machines was politically motivated. In a November 2008 letter sent to a UK House of Lords select committee, Kevin McKernan, senior director of scientific operations at Applied Biosystems (ABI), cried foul at the Sanger Centre's decision to return five of ABI's SOLiD System machines in favour of the platform developed by Illumina/Solexa.

The letter accused Sanger researchers of bearing a grudge against ABI because of its Craig Venter-tinged connections in the race to sequence the human genome. McKernan also asserted that the institute leadership took "a more historical approach" in its decision to go with more Illumina Genome Analyzer sequencers, noting that many Sanger staff members have close ties with the rival company.

Nick Loman of the University of Birmingham ridiculed this claim. "Calling the approach historical is slightly ironic given that ABI used to be the only show in town and the Sanger had over a hundred ABI machines running during the [Human Genome Project]," he wrote on the blog Pathogens: Genes and Genomes. Moreover, Solexa, which Illumina acquired in January 2007, was headquartered in Cambridgeshire, and many of their former workers turned Hinxton, UK-based Sanger staff stayed close to home, Loman noted.

Continue reading "A rock SoLiD complaint?" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on August 14, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Stanford University engineer Stephen Quake has added his name to the growing list of people who have had their individual genomes sequenced.

Quake did it using a machine made by a company he co-founded, Helicos Biosciences of Cambridge, Mass. J. Craig Venter was the first scientist to sequence his own genome; six other individual human genomes have been published and others have been sequenced by private companies.

Quake describes his achievement in a paper in Nature Biotechnology, in which he reports that he sequenced his genome with the help of two other scientists and read out 90 percent of his genome, or 2.5 billion base pairs. Quake estimated that it cost $48,000, not including the cost of the sequencing machine itself, which approaches nearly $1 million. Stanford University purchased a Helicos sequencing machine last year at an undisclosed price.

Continue reading "Live nude genes: another scientist bares his genome to the world" »

Posted by Erika Check Hayden on August 11, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Mico Tatalovic

Rooks can figure out how to use tools to get the food floating at the bottom of a long tube, just like their relative does in Aesop’s ancient fable The Crow and the Pitcher, according to a new study published in Current Biology. Zoologists report that rooks, which do not usually use tools in the wild, were able to size up the problem and solve it by using stones as tools.

The experiments echo Aesop’s fable, published more than 2,000 years ago, where a crow drops stones into a pitcher to raise the water level so it can quench its thirst. The experiment here involved a bird figuring out how to get to its favourite food item – the larvae of a wax moth, because the researchers couldn’t deprive the birds of water for ethical reasons.



Nathan Emery, co-author of the paper, from Queen Mary University of London, said: "The rooks have to put multiple stones in the tube until the worm floats to the top." And when they were presented with rocks of different sizes, they went for the larger ones that get the worm out quicker. "They are being as efficient as possible," Emery told the BBC.

Emery’s co-author is the appropriately named Christopher Bird, who has previously featured on the Great Beyond for his 2008 paper ‘Using video playback to investigate the social preferences of rooks’.

This study adds to the growing evidence that corvids, like great apes, have evolved a problem-solving intelligence requiring a general understanding of physical rules.

More videos below the fold.

Continue reading "Rooks with rocks prove Aesop right" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 07, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Mico Tatalovic

Pterosaurs may have been able to fly just as well as birds, thanks to their complex wing fibres, according to a paper published this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

An international team of scientists used a new technique involving shinning ultra-violet light on fossils of the pterosaur Jeholopterus ningchengensis to study in detail the fossilised tissue structure. They found that their wings contained several layers of fibres to control movement, and not just a single layer as previously thought.

“The configuration observed in Jeholopterus might have allowed subtle changes in the membrane tension during flight, resulting in more control of flight movements,” write the authors in their paper.

They also found that hair-like fibres covered pterosaurs’ body and wings. “They are different from other furs we find in mammals and they provide us another hint that these animals were able to control their body temperature, they were hot-blooded animals,” says Alexander Kellner, a palaeontologist at Brazil's National Museum in Rio (Reuters).

The finer aspects of pterosaur flight are still a mystery. Some of these animals weighted 250kg and scientists have previously suggested they had to run on all four legs to get off the ground. Others were tiny creatures (with wing span of just 25 cm), likely living in trees and hanging on with their claws.

But new fossils of pterosaurs are still being found (http://blogs.nature.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi) and although some have already inspired biomechanical flying robots it looks like we’ve still got a lot to learn about these extinct animals.

Image: Jeholopterus ningchengensis under natural and UV light / Xiaolin Wang

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 06, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The complex shapes that the HIV genome twists itself into have been totally mapped by the first time by a team of US researchers.

RNA viruses such as HIV like to fold themselves up and a proper picture of the shapes they form has been lacking, with researchers generally confining themselves to looking at small sections. In this week’s Nature, Joseph Watts, of the University of North Carolina, and his colleagues set out to look at the bigger picture.

In a News and Views article accompanying the research paper, Hashim Al-Hashimi of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, notes that structural biologists usually “cut out” the motifs formed by RNA and then “zoom in to determine their three-dimensional structures in an attempt to further understand their function. … However, Watts et al. zoom out and provide an ‘aerial view’ of the secondary structure of the entire HIV-1 genome.”

What they produced is, in Wired’s words, “the cellular equivalent of a rough wiring diagram”.

“What this may reveal is some of the proteins operating at a level below the structures, which may have all sorts of functions within the virus,” says David Robertson, of the University of Manchester (BBC). “More generally, if we can unpick the structures then we can compare the systems of different viruses and gain new understanding of how they work.”

Study author Kevin Weeks says the technique used here with HIV could also be applied to other virus such as influenza and might open up new opportunities for drug treatments (press release).

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 06, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Mico Tatalovic

Arachnophobes may want to think twice before checking out the new 3D models of “scary ancient spiders” released today.

Russell Garwood, of Imperial College London, and his colleagues, used a new technique called high-resolution X-ray micro-tomography to scan two fossilised specimens of 300 million old arachnids called Cryptomartus hindi and Eophrynus prestvicii to produce the 3D computer models of what these creatures would have looked like. The aim of their study, soon to be published in Biology Letters, was to use the physical traits of these extinct animals to reveal how they lived (press release).

For example, from seeing that C. hindi's first two legs were angled towards the front of the body, they deduced that it used these limbs to grab prey, suggesting it was an ambush predator. It may have been much like modern day crab spiders, which wait for insect prey at the edge of the flowers before grabbing them with similarly positioned legs.

The study also indicates that many of the morphological features seen in these ancient animals still exist in modern day relatives and some could even be used to provide evidence for evolutionary relatedness of some of these organisms. This new X-ray technique could be used to re-analyse already studied fossils to provide a clearer picture of how ancient extinct species lived and has “the potential … to revolutionise the study” of many fossils, Garwood’s team write.

Image: Cryptomartus hindi / Natural History Museum and Imperial College London

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 05, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The US National Academies has launched its long-awaited review of the scientific evidence used to track down the alleged creator of the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001. A 15-member expert panel met in Washington DC on 30-31 July to determine whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) relied on appropriate scientific techniques when it implicated government biodefence researcher Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide last July as prosecutors prepared to indict him as the person responsible for mailing the Bacillus anthracis spores that killed five people and sickened 17 others.

"It is important that we understand what happened," Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) told the committee on Friday. "The illogic of the investigation that I witnessed leads me to question whether the scientific and technical steps were well undertaken."

Continue reading "Anthrax investigation probe underway" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on July 31, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Mico Tatalovic

It seems counterintuitive, but a paper published in Nature raises the possibility of losing weight by injecting fat cells.

In the paper American researchers describe using a molecular switch – two proteins PRDM16-C/EBP-beta – to turn mouse and human skin cells into brown fat cells (paper, press release).

White fat cells store fat, while brown fat cells use those stores to produce heat. Heavier people seem to have more white fat but less brown fat than slim people, so one idea for treating obese people is to increase stores of the energy-burning fat. Until now this could not be done since making brown fat was a mystery.

“Brown fat is one of the body’s natural defenses against obesity,” said cell biologist Bruce Spiegelman of Harvard Medical School, who co-authored the paper. “We’re trying to tap into a natural pathway involved in this kind of biology.” (Wired.)

Continue reading "Fighting fat with fat " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 30, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A former SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory researcher who allegedly destroyed $500,000 worth of protein crystals earlier this month was arrested and charged on Monday for willfully ruining government property.

The 4,000 to 5,000 now-useless protein crystals represented a “whole variety of different samples” involved in the Protein Structure Initiative, a federally-funded project to expedite the discovery of atomic-level protein structures, says Ian Wilson, director of the Joint Center for Structural Genomics (JCSG), which oversees the initiative. Some crystals were aimed at matching three-dimensional protein structures with their corresponding DNA sequences; others were part of targeted research projects including the Human Microbiome Project and efforts to map every protein made by the bacterium Thermotoga maritima.

Continue reading "Vandal destroys protein crystals in California" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on July 29, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Policy | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

How do orangutans swing through the trees? Carefully.

That awful joke takes us smoothly into the first of two studies today on the science of swinging.

First up: in a paper published in PNAS three researchers describe their work on how Sumatran orangutans move on spindly branches that appear incapable of holding their hefty weight. It seems that the animals carefully avoid setting up resonance effects of the kind that causes bridges to wobble when people march in step across them.

“We found that certain locomotor behaviours clearly are associated with the most compliant supports; these behaviours appear to lack regular limb sequences, which serves to avoid the risk of resonance in branch sway caused by high-frequency, patterned gait,” write the authors.

“Balance and increased stability are achieved through long contact times between multiple limbs and supports and a combination of pronograde (horizontal) and orthograde (vertical) body postures, used both above branches and in suspension underneath them.”

While the fact that orangs move through trees by gripping multiple branches and not using regular movements may seem obvious, the animals do differ from other primates, which often suspend themselves below branches rather than carefully balancing their way through, say the authors. Smaller animals also have to worry less about those resonance effects.

Continue reading "Man vs Orang in swinging science" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 29, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Here’s one way in which candy might be good for you. A chemical dye similar to the compound that gives a blue hue to some types of Jell-O and M&Ms could protect injured spinal cords from further damage. Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center in upstate New York found that rats injected with a dye called Brilliant Blue G (BBG) recovered from spinal injury and regained the ability to walk, albeit with a limp, whereas control rats remained paralyzed. The only side effect: the rats turned blue.

The finding came five years after the research team first reported in Nature Medicine that adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a vital energy metabolite, surges at the site of spinal injury to overstimulate and stress nerve cells. The Rochester researchers targeted an ATP receptor, which mitigated the spinal damage, but the ATP blocker was too large to cross the blood-brain barrier and had to be injected directly into the site of the wound — a less-than-desirable treatment for spinal cord patients. So the researchers went on the hunt for compounds with a similar structure, and they happened upon BBG. Publishing online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Maiken Nedergaard and her colleagues show that the blue dye can be given intravenously to reduce the size of spinal lesions and to improve motor skills.

This could be a boon for a new field of culinary neuroscience, hinted Nedergaard. “One of the reasons no one had done this before is that food science is very separate from neuroscience. Those two fields don’t interact at all.” (Wired) Nedergaard noted that the average American ingests about a teaspoon of blue dye each year, so the compound is likely safe for consumption. Even so, while humans might eat enough dye to turn their tongues blue, “the levels ingested in food stuffs don't make us go blue,” said Mark Bacon, head of research at the British charity Spinal Research. (BBC) “What is safe at one dose may not be safe at higher doses,” he cautioned. No need to run to the sweetshop quite yet, it seems.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 28, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A multi-million refurb on the site at the epicentre of the UK’s 2007 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak has done a Lazurus and come back to life.

Earlier this year plans to do up the Institute for Animal Health at Pirbright to the tune of £120 million appeared to have been scuppered when the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs backed off (see: Britain hits a hurdle in replacing key animal-pathogen facility).

But yesterday the Government announced it would be funding a £100 million overhaul, with investment from a different sector, the newly formed Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. The money will allow the institute to implement the recommendations of reviews produced in the wake of the foot-and-mouth outbreak, including new labs (press release).

“What I hope is that it will give confidence to all our stakeholders that here at Pirbright we have the world’s leading experts. That it will be state-of-the-art and it will be as safe as it can possibly be,” says institute director, Martin Shirley (BBC).

The funding, says Shirley, is also a recognition of the “increasing threats” posed by animal diseases such as … err … foot and mouth.

Previous Pirbright
Britain hits a hurdle in replacing key animal-pathogen facility – Nature News, 10 February 2009
Setback for key UK animal lab – Nature News, 5 December 2008
British government tightens up lab biosecurity – The Great Beyond, 10 October 2008
Anybody know a good plumber? – The Great Beyond, 07 September 2007

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 28, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Earth, environment & ecology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Lizzie Buchen

Researchers in the newly emerging field of synthetic biology need to explain their science to the public to avoid unwarranted fears over its potential, an international group of researchers warned this week.

Public education and engagement are two of most important challenges facing the field, which aims to build biological components with potentially useful functions, they told a symposium held at the US National Academy of Sciences. But the relatively new discipline also presents a unique opportunity for public outreach, according to keynote speaker Arden Bement, Jr, director of the National Science Foundation: “we have the chance to get it right at the outset”.

Continue reading "‘Shiny happy biology’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 10, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The UK government announced £150 million of investment for small technology firms by way of a venture capital initiative on 29 June, to general approval from venture capitalists, and particularly the biotech industry, who had been lobbying for support.

The newly-created UK Innovation Investment Fund will invest in a collection of other venture capital funds thereby ultimately boosting investment in start-ups and spin-outs - in life sciences, clean technology, digital sciences and advanced manufacturing, according to prime minister Gordon Brown. A private-sector fund manager will choose where the money goes, and first funds are due by the end of the year.

"We need the Google or Genentech of the future and they will only be created if there is the capital to back them," said science minister Paul Drayson (Wall Street Journal).

Continue reading "£150 million ventured, shot-in-the-arm for UK biotech gained?" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on June 30, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Roche has decided it is tired of having its name prefixed with the words ‘pharma giant’. In response, the company is bailing out of the pharmaceutical industry associations in both the UK and the US.

Instead, it will be signing up with the US Biotechnology Industry Association (BIO). The move follows the company’s merger with biotech firm Genentech earlier this year for around $46 billion.

“As part of the world's largest biotechnology company, Genentech and Roche believe that BIO’s purpose is closely aligned with the direction of the new company and, therefore, can represent the company’s interests in Washington, among policymakers, legislators and the general public,” said the company (AP).

Farewell big pharma, hello big biotech.

Continue reading "Roche: we’re not pharma anymore" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 30, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

deCODE Genetics, a biotechnology company based in Reykjavik, Iceland, has been relisted on the NASDAQ Global Market stock exchange, the company announced last Friday.

deCODE is famous for its aggressive pursuit of DNA sequence variations linked to human disease, and aims to use this information to develop diagnostic tools and uncover new drug targets. Last October, its steadily declining stock price combined with a crashing market to drive the company's market capitalization (a measure of a company's worth, based on share price) below the $50 million minimum required to be listed on the NASDAQ Global Market stock exchange. (See 'Icelandic biotech feels the pinch', subscription required.) At that time, CEO Kari Stefansson said management was restructuring the company. The stakes were high -- in November, one analyst told Nature (subscription required) that if deCODE didn't find a way to boost their financial position, the company had little chance of surviving to see 2009.

But the company has lived on (and continued to crank out high profile genome-wide association studies). The decision to relist deCODE reverses a February decision to bump the company to the NASDAQ Capital Market, which generally lists companies with smaller market capitalization. deCODE hasn't released information about what might have spurred the change of heart -- the company's market capitalization still hovers around $37 million, and that's including the ~33% bump in stock price following last week's announcement.

Posted by Heidi Ledford on June 30, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Biologic drugs should face the same generic competition as standard pharmaceuticals after seven years, aides of US president Barack Obama have stated.

Be they called bio-similars, bio-generics, follow-on biologics or something else, products derived from biotechnology have been a hot topic in the US recently. Obama has come down somewhere between the extremes currently proposed for these drugs.

Democratic House rep Henry Waxman proposed legislation that would give biotech drugs just five years of exclusivity before other companies could muscle in. Another rep, Republican Anna Eshoo, put forward a proposal offering 12 years.

Now Bloomberg has obtained a letter from Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform, and Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, pushing for a “generous compromise” on seven years.

“Lengthy periods of exclusivity will harm patients by diminishing innovation and unnecessarily delaying access to affordable drugs,” they wrote.

Continue reading "Biosimilars: Obama’s seven year pitch" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 29, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last year Nature’s Phil Ball wrote about the amazing parrot Snowball, the first animal to be scientifically proven to dance. Earlier this year the research was published, to great media interest.

Now a video has surfaced of Snowball dancing with some of the world’s leading bird biologists at the recent World Science Festival (55 seconds in to the clip below).

The struttin’ scientists (as ID by The Scientist) are: Duke University's Erich Jarvis, University of Cambridge's Nicola Clayton, Brandeis University's Irene Pepperberg, and City College New York's Ofer Tchernichovski.

Personally, I think Snowball has the best moves.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 23, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a drill, actual inventory procedures may vary.

It's a fact of lab life that stuff gets lost in the shuffle. Digging up that old data spreadsheet or lab notebook is probably not too much more than an inconvenience for most researchers. But if you happen to work at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick in Fredrick, Maryland then it's a lot more serious than that.

At a press conference yesterday Col. Mark Kortepeter, USAMRIID's deputy commander told reporters that a recent inventory had turned up some 9,300 vials of previously uncatalogued pathogens, including serum samples from patients who had contracted hemorrhagic fever during the Korean War. The inventory also turned up Ebola, plague, anthrax, and botulism. Most of the samples were left by researchers who had since retired from the laboratory.

The report was bound to get tonnes of press, in part because USAMRIID is the former employer of Bruce Ivins, a researcher who the FBI named a "person of interest" in the 2001 anthrax attacks. Ivans died of a Tylenol overdose in July of 2008. This February, it emerged that Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus at the lab had gone unaccounted for, and all work was suspended until this inventory was completed.

Officials told reporters that numerous new security measures have been installed at the lab since 2001, and they've instituted an "aggressive" inventory system to ensure that future samples don't go unnoticed. It's clear that USAMRIID hopes to use this event to draw a line under its recently troubled past.

Image: US Army/ArraySarah

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on June 18, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine, Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Woolly mammoths roamed the UK far later than is normally believed, according to a paper published today in the Geological Journal.

Adrian Lister, of the London Natural History Museum, says new carbon dating of bones first excavated in 1986 also shows climate change, rather than humans hungry for mammoth steak, may have been behind their eventual extinction.

“Mammoths are conventionally believed to have become extinct in North Western Europe about 21,000 years ago during the main ice advance, known as the 'Last Glacial Maximum',” says Lister (press release). “Our new radiocarbon dating of the Condover mammoths changes that, by showing that mammoths returned to Britain and survived until around 14,000 years ago.”

This new date ties in with the takeover of grassy plains by forests. Mammoths preferred plains and were not very good in forests, as their tusks would get tangled in the branches (possibly).

Continue reading "Mammoths around longer than thought" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 18, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Eli Lilly, the Indiana-based pharmaceutical company perhaps best known for developing Prozac, has offered to conduct preliminary drug screening of compounds developed in academic labs. The company will screen the compounds using in vitro assays against Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, cancer, and osteoporosis -- all for the low, low price of getting the first shot at subsequent licensing deals or collaborations.

Lilly’s latest move is another sign of big pharma’s increasing creativity as it prowls academic labs for new early drug leads. Although broad agreements between universities and industry make some uneasy, pharma’s hunger for pipeline-replenishing drug candidates comes as funding agencies pressure academics to translate their results into therapies that will provide a clinical benefit. (See, for example, ‘Chemical screening centers get funding boost’ and 'Flagship drug-development initiative picks projects'; subscription required). The result: more collaboration between the two sectors.

For Lilly’s latest endeavor, called the Phenotypic Drug Discovery programme (PD2), the company hammered out a universal material transfer agreement that would be signed by institutions, sparing researchers the hassle of negotiating individual agreements. The company also claims that the identity of submitted compounds will be kept secret, even from Lilly’s own researchers, by a special computer algorithm. According to The Scientist, about 65 institutions have already signed up.

Posted by Heidi Ledford on June 17, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Who can resist a study that shows stress really does make your hair turn grey? Sadly the latest paper from Emi Nishimura has not found a link between, say, your office environment and the number of your colleagues sporting salt and pepper hairstyles.

Rather, in the latest issue of Cell, Nishimura and colleagues report that ‘genotoxic stress’ from ionising radiation damages DNA in the melanocyte stem cells that give mouse hairs their colour.

“It is estimated that a single cell in mammals can encounter approximately 100,000 DNA damaging events per day,” says Nishimura, of Tokyo Medical and Dental University (press release). “Once stem cells are damaged irreversibly, the damaged stem cells need to be eliminated to maintain the quality of the stem cell pools.”

Rather than causing the death of these stem cells, the damage makes them differentiate to form mature melanocytes instead of more stem cells, meaning nothing is left to dye the next growth of hair. So, mice exposed to radiation in their study turned permanently grey.

This may even be a mechanism to prevent damaged stem cells becoming cancerous.

“Greying may actually be a safety mechanism, that’s a cool twist,” David Fisher, of the Massachusetts General Hospital told Bloomberg. “They’ve shown that this mechanism is actually removing damaged stem cells. The good news is if you do find yourself greying, you’re probably better off not having those cells persist.”

Stress watch
“When an aging mouse's lovely brown fur turns grey, she can now officially blame stress — at least, the kind of stress that damages DNA” – CBC
“If you’ve ever blamed your gray hair on stress, you weren’t far from the truth” – Science
“We've all heard that stress causes gray hairs. Now, new research suggests it’s true” – LiveScience

Image: Ken Inomata

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 12, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted for Monya Baker from The Niche

Transplants of a fetal neural stem cell product seem safe, according to a 12-month study on six children with a horrible neurodegenerative disease called neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis or Batten disease. Furthermore, the company reported results from an autopsy of a treated patient who died from the disease. (See Girl dies in stem cell trial for Batten disease ). These indicate that the injected cells engraft and survive in the brain for close to a year.

Whether cells can survive after transplant is considered a crucial requirement for whether many cell therapies can work at all, and StemCells Inc, the company sponsoring the trial, explicitly thanked the child’s parents for allowing the autopsy to be performed.

Batten disease is a progressive neural degenerative disease in which brain cells poison themselves because they lack a crucial enzyme that clears away unnecessary fats and proteins. The hope is that transplanted cells can make enough of the enzyme to stall toxic build-up in the host cells as well.

As is typical in clinical trials, the small study, which lacked a control group, was not designed to assess whether the experimental procedure could help patients, only whether or not it would harm them. A summary of data and results can be found in this press release. Each patient received injections to 8 spots in the brain totaling approximately 500 million or a billion cells. Adverse events were reported, but none could be attributed to the stem cell injections.

Continue reading "StemCells clinical trial results: Cells survive, seem safe" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 10, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of David Cyranoski

On Monday 8 June, the Jang Yeong-sil Memorial Foundation wanted to give cloning expert Woo Suk Hwang an award for scientific excellence. But according to The Korea Herald, Hwang had another appointment - with the Seoul district court that is still, after more than 3 years, trying to figure out if his scientific fraud is legally actionable.

An official from the foundation said, "Even though he is on trial, we have made our decision by considering his achievements in the embryonic stem-cell development and his success in cloning dogs." One might contest both those points. Investigation into Hwang’s embryonic stem-cell research left little to believe in after picking away the layers of fabrication.

And the successful dog cloning is largely credited to another scientist, Byeong Chun Lee, who was also at the hearing and, like Hwang, is under investigation for fraud related to their previous experiments.

Lee and Hwang have since ended up on opposite sides of another court case - over the patents related to dog cloning.

Posted by Mark Peplow on June 09, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Termites and other pests are challenged by microbial invaders like bacteria and fungi. So, why can’t our enemies’ enemies be our friends?

Ram Sasisekharan and his colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked to some termite immune molecules, particularly a gram negative bacteria binding protein tGNBP-2 that is used by the wood chewers to fend off infections, for a way to create new pesticides.

tGNBP-2 recognizes carbohydrates associated with infectious microbes, and also cleaves the structure, alerting the immune system to the pathogen. Termites have the protein in their cells, but also secrete it and infuse their nests with it. The researchers found a modified glucose molecule that can bind to an active pocket of tGNBP-2 and deactivated it. This molecule, D-δ-gluconolactone (GDL) made termites more susceptible to subsequent infection with the fungus Metarhizium anisopliae in lab tests. The insects were also more susceptible to opportunistic infections.

See all the gory coverage at The Scientist, The Telegraph and in National Geographic News.

Kudos to The Scientist (full disclosure: they are my former employers), for getting some needed words of caution from a pathologist/entomologist who has experience in pest control.

Image: Turning Termite from Anauxite under creative commons.

Posted by Brendan Maher on June 09, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s that time of year again – the annual battle for control of Biogen Idec, one of the grande dames of biotech. And today’s installment did not disappoint.

For those of you who haven’t been glued to the Biogen soap opera, here’s a quick catch-up: Biogen is one of the oldest biotechnology companies and arguably the founder of the Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech cluster. The company chugged along for nearly thirty years until 2007, when billionaire ‘corporate raider’/’shareholder activist’ (depending on whose side you’re on) Carl Icahn became one of Biogen’s largest shareholders. With an eye on the multi-billion dollar prices pharmaceutical companies were paying for biotech firms, Icahn immediately tried to force Biogen executives to sell the company. The execs put the company on the market for a few months, then shrugged and said they couldn’t find any takers. Icahn didn't buy that: he accused Biogen of lying to investors and interfering with the search for a suitor, and then sued the company for access to records pertaining to the failed sales attempt. (More details available here, subscription required.) After that, Icahn riled Biogen executives again when he lobbied for the company to be split into two. “Once again, Icahn and his associates have demonstrated that they fundamentally do not understand our business,” board chairman Bruce Ross and CEO James Mullen wrote in a letter to shareholders.

Which brings us to today. In what promises to become a yearly tradition, Icahn tried to forcefully take hold of Biogen’s board of directors by nominating four of his associates to the board. (He tried this approach last year as well, and failed.) Biogen was to tally voting results today at the annual shareholder’s meeting, which started at 9am, but then Ross unexpectedly announced a recess until 2pm. The delay prompted an outcry from Icahn’s posse, with one of his nominees reportedly protesting, “This isn’t North Korea.” When the meeting rejoined in the afternoon, Ross said votes were still being tallied and winners would not be announced until later this month. Before the afternoon was over, Icahn had called Biogen's behavior "sort of despicable" (Boston Globe), declared victory for two of his nominees (although no official vote tallies have been released) and, of course, filed another lawsuit against the company.

What did the shareholders decide? What will Icahn try next? How long will Biogen survive as an independent company? All of this and more, to be continued…

Posted by Heidi Ledford on June 03, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for David Cyranoski

Researchers in China have made pluripotent stem cells from a pig. The cells could be useful for making humanized pig organs for transplant to humans, pig models of human disease useful testing drugs, and for improving pig farming productivity and nutritional value.

Lei Xiao, head of the research group at the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences where the research was done, admits that none of these will happen for the next several years. But his creation in pigs of induced pluripotent stem (iPS)-cells which share with embryonic stem cells the ability to differentiate into any cell type in the body-is still a huge accomplishment. (Paper).

The isolation and culture of embryonic stem (ES) cells from mice in 1981 revolutionized the use of mice as a developmental and biomedical research model. But it is a difficult process. It took 17 years to culture human iPS
cells. Even now there are ES cells for only four mammals: mice, humans, monkeys, and rats. Pig ES cells, despite many attempts, still do not exist.

Continue reading "Forget swine flu-bring on the humanized pigs!" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 03, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Deuterium drugs have hit the big time. Concert Pharmaceuticals, a start-up company based in Lexington, Massachusetts, US, which specialises in swapping hydrogen atoms on known drugs for deuterium atoms, (Nature, subscription required) has signed a deal worth potentially $1 billion with pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline.

The company, which was founded in 2006, will develop 3 drugs with GSK: a protease inhibitor to treat HIV, a drug for chronic renal disease and a third mystery product. The company will also do their deuterium magic with 3 of GSKs pipeline products. They get $35 million upfront, with future payments being made for milestones reached and more upfront payments. (Press release).

The news has gone big, with pick up in major news outlets, (AP, Wall Street Journal, FierceBiotech) and GSK’s shares fell slightly after the deal was announced (Reuters).

In future the patent field around deuterating known drugs is likely to get murky, as Derek Lowe points out in The Atlantic but for now it looks like Concert is sitting pretty in its deuterium world.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 02, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday Nature published a paper heralding the birth of the first transgenic non-human primates - in other words a genetically modified adult gave birth to offspring that inherited the modification.

Their birth offers to researchers the chance to use more human-like models for disease than the currently-favoured mice, or rhesus macaque (another monkey disease model, but one in which transgenic offspring have never been produced). The marmosets have been born expressing the gene for green fluorescent protein (GFP). The neat thing about GFP is that it’s easy to spot – the marmosets have green feet under UV light.

But also, and this might be why they received just quite so much coverage, these marmosets are unbelievably cute.

Favourite headline/standfirst of the day came from WA Today, with “The green Monkeys are coming / They’re monkeys but not as we know them”

Coverage was generally positive, although NPR ran a story about 50 years since monkeys were sent to space, with a disturbing picture.

The cuteness of the animals will undoubtedly give animal activists new ammunition, and this warning is covering in an editorial to accompany the paper.

Continue reading "Marvellous marmosets" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on May 28, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Rooks can't bend spoons with their minds just yet, but they did bend wires using their beaks to hook food in a recent study (video here, large file).

Led by the appropriately named Chris Bird, this experiment adds rooks, a member of the Corvid family, to the list of animals that create and use tools. Unlike most known tool-using species, such as chimpanzees or other types of crows, rooks do not appear to use tools in the wild. Previous studies have shown that capuchin monkeys are more likely to resort to tool use in labs than in the wild.

Rooks may simply be too lazy to bother making tools in the wild, write the study authors: "Rooks exploit a number of different, readily-available food sources, such as seeds, insects, carrion, and refuse and as such may lack the motivation to use tools in the wild."

The researchers also argue that the tool-making is an example of an original insight, since the birds in the study were hand-raised and had neither seen other birds attempt the task, nor practised the task themselves before solving it.

They add that the finding adds to evidence that birds may have independently evolved a kind of problem-solving intelligence comparable to primate intelligence.

The paper should be available on this link by the end of the week:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0901008106

Headline watch
Rook with a hook proves bird brains are the equal of monkeys' - Daily Mail
Clever rooks have plenty to crow about - Irish Times
Rooks are not so bird-brained - Daily Telegraph
Caw blimey! Rooks can make tools - Cambridge News

Image: PNAS

Posted by Lucas Laursen on May 26, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

...and it's not a director's cut of David Attenborough

According to a Nature paper that's receiving some pickup (Reuters, CSM ) the history of life on earth may just have got roughly 15% longer. That may not sound a huge difference, but a 15% extension on life's lease adds up to 600 million years -- roughly equivalent to the time taken for animals to get from creepy little things that couldn’t even crawl to your pet cat.

There were no animals on earth, though, during the 600 million years in question. The paper by Oleg Abramov and Stephen Mojzsis [link fixed] at the University of Colorado is about the earliest life, not the latest. Previous research has suggested that the heavy rain of asteroids, comets and the like that characterised the early solar system would have made the earth too hazardous a place for life to persist until after what is known as the "Late Heavy Bombardment" some 3.9 billion years ago. Impacts by large objects, it was thought, would vapourise whole oceans and wrap the earth in an atmosphere of superheated steam which would sterilise the planet.

The model developed by Abramov and Mojzis tells a different story. Pretty much everywhere on the planet gets zapped by a big rock, often more than once – but there are never any occasions where the whole planet including all the subsurface is simultaneously uninhabitable. If life had got started during this time, they argue, it could have persisted ever since.

At present the first evidence for life comes right after the Late Heavy Bombardment, about 3.8 million billion years ago. The speed with which that life developed after the bombardment has been seen by some as evidence that life is implicit in the way the universe is set up, and will arise spontaneously PDQ wherever it gets the chance. If it took 600 million years, though, then one would have to start thinking that life is relatively unlikely, which obvioulsy has implications for astrobiology.

It may still be the case that life arose as soon as it could, right at the beginning of the earth's history – but it is going to be harder to prove it. While bacteria may have been able to survive the horrible early history of the earth, rocks were not so lucky – there are no major bits of crust left over from back then.

In a related happy accident, this week Nature also has a fine feature on Mike Russell and his research on the metabolism-first approach to the origins of life.

Image: simulation of the state of the Earth at the end of Late Heavy Bombardment. Circles are crater locations; colors show temperature / Oleg Abramov

Posted by Oliver Morton on May 21, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday's announcement of a 47-million-year-old primate fossil nicknamed "Ida" has provoked a large, if uneven, media response.

A press release entitled "WORLD RENOWNED SCIENTISTS REVEAL A REVOLUTIONARY SCIENTIFIC FIND THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING" got reporters’ attention last week, after a pair of earlier scoops (which Nature blogged) revealed that the finding was an unusually intact primate fossil dating to 47 million years ago, a time when most primates looked more like squirrels than people.

The fossil’s official announcement yesterday came one week ahead of the US premiere of a television documentary unashamedly entitled “The Link”. A book by the same title appeared on US and UK bookshelves today, after waiting Harry Potter-style in sealed boxes, wrote the New York Times. The Times labeled the furore “science for the Mediacene age”.

Scientists and others have expressed admiration for the find and contempt for its reception in many media outlets.

Continue reading "Missing link, evidence thereof - media analysis" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen on May 20, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for David Cyranoski

Korean newspapers are reporting that Woo Suk Hwang and his research group are trying to get back in the big leagues by doing in pigs what he had once claimed to do in humans.

The once-famed cloner and now famed fraudster has been running the Sooam Biotech Research Centre, funded with private money, outside of Seoul for a couple years now.

On 15 May, Hyun Sang-hwan, identified as "Hwang's key colleague" told the Korea Times that they had succeeded in creating a cloned pig embryo, extracting stem cells from it, and establishing lines of self-reproducing cloned cells from them.

Continue reading "New Hwang cloning claim" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 18, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With the help of some carefully chosen words to the Daily Mail and a belated "Oops, I've said too much" to the Wall Street Journal, a team of researchers and public relations virtuosos have attracted extraordinary attention to a primate find.

Philip Gingerich, the Director of the University of Michigan's Museum of Paleontology and Jørn Hurum of the University of Oslo will reportedly publish a peer-reviewed article about a new primate skeleton found in Germany with the Public Library of Science tomorrow. The timing coincides with the opening of a related exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York hosted by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a BBC documentary hosted by Sir David Attenborough, according to the Wall Street Journal and Daily Mail articles.

Continue reading "Missing link, evidence thereof" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen on May 18, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which regulates animal research in the US, has found animal welfare lapses at the New Iberia Research Centre.

The Humane Society carried out an undercover investigation of the centre, which is run by the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, and filed a complaint to the USDA, according to a statement . The Humane Society investigator claimed to have recorded videos of animal handlers allowing sedated primates to fall to the ground, and video of animals with open wounds.

The USDA confirmed that a March inspection found "evidence of several issues with the facility’s compliance with Animal Welfare Act (AWA) standards" and problems with "review and approval of research protocols." This included a number of African Green Monkeys whose tails had been amputated due to trauma or frostbite, reports The Scientist, in part because their enclosure was inadequately heated.

Violators of the Animal Welfare Act can get warning letters, fines or lose their licenses. In this case, the USDA is working with the centre administrators to improve animal care standards. A follow-up visit in late April found that most of the issues identified on the USDA's March visit had been addressed.

Previous coverage on The Great Beyond: Primate mistreatment allegations at Louisiana research lab - March 05, 2009

Posted by Lucas Laursen on May 13, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Count Lennart Bernadotte of didn’t quite make it to 100. He died in 2004 at the age of 95, but not before ensuring that his life’s great project had a future. Great grandson of King Oscar II who presented the first Nobel awards in Stockholm in 1901, Count Lennart launched, exactly sixty years ago, the Nobel Laureates Meeting in Lindau, a pretty but very provincial town on Lake Constance. The original aim of the weeklong meetings was to encourage isolated and struggling scientists and doctors in post-war Germany by bringing them into social contact with great living scientists from around the world.

Over the next 55 years or so, not a lot changed, even though Germany was no longer isolated or struggling. The meetings – morning lectures, afternoon discussions, evening dances - were popular but remained anachronistically provincial. By the turn of the millennium that had become unsustainable. Laureates were becoming less interested in a long trip to speak with locals at meetings primarily conducted in German, however charming the location.

In 2005, the meetings were internationalised and thrust into the modern world (Nature 436, 170-1). Now 600 hand-picked students from all around the world mingle, discuss and dance with 20 or more Nobel laureates during summer.

To commemorate the centenary of Count Lennart’s birth on 8 May, the Meetings organisers set up a science-history project to digitalise selected lectures from their archives and make them openly available on their webpage (www.lindau-nobel.de). The first eleven selected lectures are now live, more will follow in phases throughout the summer.

The cleaned up voice recordings, accompanied by an introduction and charming black-and-white photos taken in Lindau, bring legendary scientists to life – be it Rita Levi Montalcini (Physiology or Medicine, 1986) pushing her human-rights agenda, Rosalyn Yalow (Physiology or Medicine, 1977) appealing to women to help solve social problems or simply the extraordinary plumminess of the British tones of Lawrence Bragg (Physics 1915) and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (Chemistry 1964). A particular treasure is the lecture on the gravitational constant by Paul Dirac (1933, Physics). Dirac was renowned for being almost pathologically socially withdrawn. Despite this, he showed up to the first ten meetings in Lindau, where, they say, he remained almost silent aside from his lectures.

Coming soon – Werner Heisenberg, Konrad Lorenz, James Watson and other stellar personalities.

Image: Nobel Laureate Dorothy Crowfoot-Hodgkin (Chemistry 1964) and young researchers at
the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting 1986.

Posted by Alison Abbott on May 11, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Health and medicine, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last year the European Court of Human Rights told the UK government it couldn’t keep the DNA of innocent people on its police database. Today the UK government announced how it would deal with the ruling, in a response that basically amounts to two fingers to the court.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who has already been beset by controversy this year, wants to keep DNA profiles of innocent people arrested but not convicted of serious violent or sexual crimes for 12 years. Innocent people arrested but not convicted of other crimes would be kept for six years.

Opposition party shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said, “The government just doesn’t get this. People in Britain should be innocent until proven guilty.” (Reuters.)

Civil liberties groups and opinion writers have also reacted with outrage to the proposals.

Continue reading "UK will retain DNA of innocent accused" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 07, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The UK’s charming Royal Botanic Garden at Kew in London is 250 years old.

To celebrate this anniversary our hereditary ruler the Queen and her consort the Duke of Edinburgh are visiting, and the former will be presented with a new specially bred thornless rose called the Kew Gardens.

In an event the UK’s republican types will doubtless consider symbolic, the pair will also plant two living fossils at the gardens, according to the Daily Telegraph:

The Queen will plant a Ginkgo, an ancient tree known as a "living fossil" which is now native only to a small area of central China. Prince Philip will plant a Wollemi pine, also known from fossil records. It was thought to be extinct until it was rediscovered in Australia in 1994 and it is now part of an international conservation programme.

It is to be hoped that these planting go better than the royal couple’s last additions to the gardens, as the Times notes:

The royal couple’s last official visit to Kew Gardens was 50 years ago for its 200th anniversary when they both planted trees. The swamp cypress planted by the Duke in front of Kew Palace is doing extremely well, but it is understood that the Queen will learn only today that the walnut tree she planted was a victim of the 1989 storms.

Even Google is getting in on the celebrations, with a special graphic on its UK homepage.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 05, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in June last year Nature’s own Philip Ball reported on new research showing that a male sulphur-crested cockatoo named Snowball really can dance:

Aniruddh Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues say that Snowball’s ability to shake his stuff is much more than a cute curiosity. It could shed light on the biological bases of rhythm perception, and might even hold implications for the use of music in treating neurodegenerative disease.

Patel and colleagues videoed Snowball’s movement to music and slowly altered the tempo of his tunes. Statistical analysis showed that he was synching to the beat. Now Patel’s research has been published in Current Biology, and the world’s media has gone predictably crazy.

“People are not the only ones who've got rhythm – birds can also get into the groove claim scientists,” says the Daily Telegraph. “Parrots join humans on the dance floor,” says NPR. The Daily Mail says Snowball’s musical taste is “questionable” as he generally dances to the Backstreet Boys, a fact that has led the Sun to brand him “Beakstreet Boy”.

Here’s what you all want to see:

See: Birds that boogie, 25 June 2008, for more.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 01, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Rex Dalton

The plankton record doesn’t lie. And again it is showing that the meteor that created the Chicxulub impact crater in Mexico didn’t cause the Cretaceous/Tertiary [KT] mass extinction, says Gerta Keller – the Princeton University paleontologist whose group has been a primary questioner of the widely accepted theory that the asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs and most life 65 million years ago.

As researchers were wrapping up last week’s European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, Austria, the Keller group is publishing an article April 27 online in the Journal of the Geological Society, London, [JGSL 166, 393-411 2009 doi: 10.1144/0016-76492008-116] on its latest data in support of its view that the impact occurred 300,000 years before the KT mass extinction. Keller’s work also is among research discussed last weekend at a post-EGU workshop on Austrian geological sections of the KT.

The article focuses on stratigraphy in northeastern Mexico, in particular a site called El Penon outside Monterrey in the state of Nuevo Leon that is about 1,200 kilometres from the impact location on the Yucatan Peninsula. At El Penon, Keller and colleagues located a line of the spherules reflecting blast material from the Yucatan impact. Looking above and below this spherule-laced section, Keller checked the fossil record of foraminifera that are used to chart life around mass extinctions.

Below the spherule line, they found 52 foraminifera species – and above the line after the impact the same 52 species were abundant. “We found not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact,” says Keller. This means the Chicxulub impact couldn’t have been the sole event causing the extinction, she says.

Continue reading "Plankton undermine dino extinction theory" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 27, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Researchers and students staged a rally on the UCLA campus yesterday in support of animal research.

The rally was organised by the new University of California, Los Angeles branch of Pro-Test, a UK group founded in Oxford which supports animal research. A group of about 40 animal rights protesters held a rally opposite the Pro-Test event, which attracted over 400 people, according to the Los Angeles Times.

UCLA neuroscientist David Jentsch, the victim of a car bombing last month, founded UCLA Pro-Test. The North American Animal Liberation Press Office posted a 'communiqué' from a group calling itself the Animal Liberation Brigade taking credit for the attack and threatening to harm Jentsch.

"I hope this rally lessens the sense of helplessness and fear that has pervaded our community," Jentsch said (UCLA newsroom). "We’re just not going to take the harassment anymore."

Nature also interviewed him last week.

A member of UCLA's Animal Law Society told a Science reporter that violence gave other animal rights activists "a bad name."

No arrests have been made in the car bombing case yet, though the FBI did report arrests in other animal rights-related cases this week and in February. The FBI is offering a reward of $75,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the Jentsch case.

Video below the fold.

Continue reading "California animal researchers protest protesters" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen on April 23, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

A potential ‘missing link’ in the evolution of seals has been discovered. A new fossil described in Nature shows features suggesting it was semi-aquatic, but had not yet fully accepted the sea as its home.

Named Puijila darwini, the animal has the long tail and limbs of a terrestrial carnivore but other features, such as indications of webbing on the feet, suggest an affinity for water. Previously the earliest pinniped – the group that includes seals, sea lions and the walrus – was an animal that already had flippers.

According to Natalia Rybczynski, of the Canadian Museum of Nature, interviewed on the Nature Podcast, the animal was “something like a river otter, but much more muscular” and was “almost a wolverine that could hunt on land and also in water” around 21 and 24 million years ago.

“The remarkably preserved skeleton of Puijila had heavy limbs, indicative of well developed muscles, and flattened phalanges which suggests that the feet were webbed, but not flippers,” says paper author Mary Dawson, of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (press release). “This animal was likely adept at both swimming and walking on land.”

Continue reading "Flippin’ heck! Proto-seal discovered" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 23, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Panayiotis Zavos does not shy away from media attention. The fertility specialist has told The Independent that he has been trying to implant human embryos using material cloned from living individuals. Everybody from the Indy's local competition to outraged scientists and sober wire services have weighed in.

Zavos has attempted to implant 11 human embryos in four women since 2003 according to The Independent, and a Discovery Channel film-maker who has witnessed the process and whose television programme premieres tonight at 9pm:

The cloning was recorded by an independent documentary film-maker who has testified to The Independent that the cloning had taken place and that the women were genuinely hoping to become pregnant with the first cloned embryos specifically created for the purposes of human reproduction.

Zavos has previously attempted controversial cloning-related treatments and attracted the ire of other fertility researchers in 2004, when he announced a result ahead of academic publication. Zavos, born on Cyprus but a naturalized US citizen, reportedly carries out his cloning attempts in the Middle East to avoid anti-human cloning laws in other countries.

He also claims to have spliced tissue from a dead child with an embryo from a cow as a learning exercise, though he has not attempted to implant the hybrid embryo. The child's mother reportedly wouldn't mind if he did. While none of these attempts with living cloned material have succeeded, his group plans to try again with 10 younger couples, according to the Indy.

Posted by Lucas Laursen on April 22, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An animal rights activist has been added to the FBI’s Most Wanted list, ranking him among terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri.

Daniel Andreas San Diego is wanted for allegedly bombing two biotechnology facilities near San Francisco, says the FBI. He is the first US ‘domestic terrorist’ to make the Most Wanted list.

Both of the buildings bombed were apparently targeted for doing business with Huntingdon Life Sciences, a company that has long been targeted by animal rights extremists.

“San Diego is a known San Francisco Bay-area animal rights extremist, involved with the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty campaign, commonly referred to as SHAC,” says Michael Heimbach, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division (statement). “We continue to make great strides in dismantling animal rights and environmental extremists, like Daniel Andreas San Diego.”

According to Heimback, animal rights and environmental extremists have committed over 1,800 criminal acts and caused over $110 million in damages. A reward of up to $250,000 is on offer for information leading to the location and arrest of San Diego, who is considered armed and dangerous.

Coverage
Animal rights activist on FBI terror list – SF Chronicle
In defense of people – Chronicle editorial
Vegan Daniel Andreas San Diego who tried to close British animal lab is put on FBI list – (London) Times
Wanted: FBI Adds Environmental Terrorist to Most-Wanted List – WSJ Environmental Capital blog

Image: detail from FBI wanted poster

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 22, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine, Policy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Rock ants refuse to live in any old hole in the ground, and researchers from the University of Bristol have been finding out how they choose between a des res and a hovel.

Temnothorax albipennis have been previously shown to pick the better of two potential nest sites even when it is nine times further away from their current abode than the less salubrious residence. If ants decide a nest site is a good place to settle down they often return to their soon-to-be former home and recruit friends.

A nest is chosen by the number of ants in a potential nest reaching a quorum, but most ants appear not to visit both sites, say Elva Robinson and her colleagues.

They fitted micro-transmitters to every worker ant in nine colonies housed in artificial nests. Each colony contained between 100 and 200 workers and larvae. The team destroyed the ants' homes and gave them a choice of a good, far-away site and a worse, closer site to move to. Chip readers on both potential nests recorded ant coming and goings.

“Each ant appears to have its own ‘threshold of acceptability’ against which to judge a nest individually,” says Robinson (press release). “Ants finding the poor nest were likely to switch and find the good nest, whereas ants finding the good nest were more likely to stay committed to that nest.”

This contrasts with previous assumptions that ants compare nests, the team write in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Ant house hunting isn’t perfect though, in this study only four of the nine colonies chose the far-away, ‘good’ nest, with three putting up the 'home sweet home' signs in the poor site and two splitting in half and moving into both.

Coverage
Tracking bugs so tiny they fit an ant – Sun
Transmitters show house-hunting ants have gift for locating a des res – Times
Ants 'go further for better nest' – PA
Ants' home search habit uncovered – BBC

Photo: Elva Robinson

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 22, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Union of Concerned Scientists has released a report attacking big farma's claims that genetically modified crops produce a higher yield per cultivated acre than traditional crops.

The report [pdf] examines academic reports of crop yields over a 20-year period, including 13 years of real-world commercial results in the US. Author Doug Gurian-Sherman attributes most yield gains in most crops to technique, not genes:

Overall, corn and soybean yields have risen substantially over the last 15 years, but largely not as result of the GE traits. Most of the gains are due to traditional breeding or improvement of other agricultural practices.

Gurian-Sherman also distinguishes between intrinsic yield, which is an idealized measure, and operational, or real-world yield. Genetic engineering only improved operational yields for corn modified with genes from Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacteria which helps the corn resist certain pests, he writes.

An industry group has responded with its own release claiming that "marker-assisted breeding has nearly doubled the rate of yield gain when compared to traditional breeding alone" and pointing out that a growing number of farmers are adopting genetically modified strains of crops.

Gurian-Sherman concedes that farmers may find certain modified crops easier to work with, but that this does not directly translate into an improved yield or a wider benefit to society.

Related in Nature News: Germany banned a breed of genetically-modified corn yesterday, joining a handful of other European countries in contradiction of EU law.

Photo: Seabamirum on Flickr

Posted by Lucas Laursen on April 15, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In January, an in-press article criticizing the statistical methodology of social scientists using fMRI to back their hypotheses caused a major stir. The no-holds-barred paper claimed that many published papers are worthless because brain imaging data have been inappropriately analysed.

Those scientists personally attacked were not only upset by the content. They were also offended by the title which referred to ‘voodoo correlations’. Many argued that they were not only well aware of the importance of good statistical practice, but also used it.

The editor of the journal in question, Perspectives in Psychological Research, has now said the final version to be published in May will appear with a more circumspect title: ‘Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality and Social Cognition’. The authors, Edward Vul from MIT and Harold Pashler from the University of California, San Diego and their colleagues also answer the specific criticisms they received in response to the widely circulated original version in an accompanying paper.

Posted by Alison Abbott on April 14, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

US scientists today report preliminary data on a brain imaging study they say may help lead to the identification of a ‘footprint’ of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the brain. Rajendra Morey, director of the neuroimaging lab at Durham Veterans Administrative Medical Centre, and his colleagues are presenting results of their study on 42 US soldiers who had recently served in Iraq or Afganistan at the World Psychiatric Association International Congress on Treatments in Psychiatry in Florence. Journalistically speaking, the group of probands is attractive, and so the study has been press-released in advance.

One group of 22 suffered from PTSD while a second group of 20 did not. Using an experimental paradigm designed to indicate how easily distracted the soldiers were, the neuroscientists showed that there were differences between the two groups of soldiers in activation of a brain area called the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, a region they say is associated with the ability to maintain vigilance. The scientists say this concords with established understanding of the underlying psychology of PTSD. Sufferers are hypervigilant, and fail to stay focussed because they are always on the look-out for unexpected threats.

They also saw also saw differences in activation in brain areas previously shown to be associated with PTSD - the medial prefrontal cortex, a large slab of tissue onto which scientists have tentatively projected many possible functions, and the amygdala, which reproducibly indicates the emotional saliency of a signal (ie ‘is what I am seeing or hearing truly appalling, or is it not quite so bad?’)

What do the results tell us? Primarily that it is possible to see group differences in brain activation patterns between people with PTSD and those without it. It is a solid piece of information, but the hope of eventually finding a useful and reliable way of predicting an individual’s susceptibility to PTSD, or to diagnosing it – as expressed in the meeting abstract – is still just a hope. This is part of a body of work which is very much in progress. Seeing group differences is a long way from being able to predict syndromes from an individual’s brain scan. For many reasons, individual brain scans are still highly variable.

Posted by Alison Abbott on April 03, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The rights and wrongs of ‘dwarf tossing’, where a large human attempts to hurl a smaller human as far as they can, have been debated by bodies as august as the United Nations. However, according to a paper published this week, careful consideration of the issue can also help us deal with ethical issues in science.

“While admittedly unusual, the case of dwarf tossing illuminates several themes central to the field of bioethics including the issues of human dignity, autonomy, and the protection of vulnerable people,” write Carlo Leget, Pascal Borry and Raymond De Vries in the latest edition of Bioethics.

Their paper explores the relationship between empirical approaches to ethics (assessing how things are) and normative approaches (assessing how things ought to be).

Paper author Raymond De Vries, of the University of Michigan Bioethics Program told Nature, “I assure you that we are serious about dwarf tossing, and if you can’t have fun while being serious, well then, count me out of this business.”

Continue reading "‘Nobody tosses a dwarf!’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 01, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of K.S. Jayaraman

A leading Indian biotechnologist has demanded that a review article in Annals of Botany be retracted because his work was not cited in it. The journal’s chief editor, Pat Heslop-Harrison of the University of Leicester, has denied the charge and rejects the allegation that the journal suppressed novel ideas coming from scientists in developing countries.

Vetury Sitaramam, former head of biotechnology at the University of Pune, has nevertheless filed a formal complaint with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) in Guildford, UK. The Indian watchdog agency, Society for Scientific Values, says it will voice its concern if the journal refuses to publish Sitaramam’s rebuttal without giving a good reason.

The article in question is a review of research on the role of mitochondrial respiration in drought and crop yield. In his complaint to COPE, Sitaramam alleges that his papers were left out because they challenged the need for genetic modification to create drought-tolerant plants. He also says the issue at stake is more than a simple argument over citation. “The whole point is why are alternate views to molecular breeding, especially from developing country scientists, becoming difficult to publish?” he asks. “This is an example of a growing trend of West marginalizing novel work from the East,” says Nandula Raghuram of GGS Indraprastha University in New Delhi and managing editor of the journal Physiology and Molecular Biology of Plants.

Heslop-Harrison refutes any allegation that Annals of Botany suppresses ideas, and in particular does not publish ideas coming from developing country scientists. “There is no evidence whatsoever for this damaging statement,” he told Nature. “Indeed I expect we publish more important science from developing countries than many other journals.”

Posted by Alex Witze on March 31, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Europe’s proposed new rules on animal experiments have come under renewed fire today.

When they were first proposed last year many researchers complained that they could stifle vital work, especially on non-human primates. They also warned the proposed rules could drastically increase the cost of experiments, without increasing animal welfare.

Now the umbrella group European Medical Research Councils and the European Science Foundation have issued a report detailing the changes they believe are needed to the draft rules (pdf).

“We certainly welcome the opportunity to standardize animal care on a Europe-wide basis,” says Roger Lemon, a researcher University College London and chair of the ESF’s animal research expert group (The Scientist). “But where we have some difficulty is where some types of research would just be stopped all together.”

Continue reading "European animal research ‘threatened by new rules’ " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 26, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Details of Charles Darwin’s student days have been revealed by a selection of bills from his time at Cambridge. The University has just released six record books detailing much of Darwin’s time at Christ’s College.

“Before this we didn’t really know very much about Darwin’s daily life at Cambridge at all,” says John van Wyhe, who heads a project which puts all Darwin’s works online. “It had been assumed that there were no significant traces of his time here left to discover, which meant that we were ironically short of information about one of the most formative parts of his life.”

The books show that Darwin enjoyed, says the Cambridge press release, “all the trappings one would expect of a 19th century gentleman, paying service-people to carry out tasks such as stoking his fire and polishing his shoes”. In addition to his fees, Darwin paid a bed-maker, a chimney-sweep, someone to polish his shoes, and various other traders.

All in all, Darwin paid £636 over his three years at Cambridge, plus £14 for his BA and £12 for his MA. The Sun newspaper notes, “Naturalist Charles Darwin spent more money on designer shoes and plush drapes than he did on books while at university, documents reveal.”

Darwin's student bills at Christ's College, Cambridge are available at the The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online website.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 23, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The rush to manufacture drugs in living organisms continues. Hot on the heals of the drug-goat, a team of European researchers have created transgenic tobacco plants that produce a potential treatment for diseases such as diabetes.

Mario Pezzotti, of the University of Verona, and colleagues successfully engineered the plant to produce anti-inflammatory compound interleukin-10, they report in BMC Biotechnology. Now they are going to feed these tobacco leaves to mice with autoimmune diseases to see if they are an effective treatment.

“Transgenic plants are attractive systems for the production of therapeutic proteins because they offer the possibility of large scale production at low cost, and they have low maintenance requirements,” says Pezzotti (press release). “The fact that they can be eaten, which delivers the drug where it is needed, thus avoiding lengthy purification procedures, is another plus compared with traditional drug synthesis.”

The press release, with considerable understatement, notes that tobacco “isn’t famous for its health benefits”. However, Pezzotti says it has many advantages for genetic modifiers such as himself.

“Tobacco is a fantastic plant because it is easy to transform genetically and you can easily regenerate an entire plant from a single cell,” he told Reuters.

Surely though it’s time to start considering the end user of any of these products.

The drug-laced milk from GM goats didn’t make it past the regulators in the US, but would consumers rather drink milk or eat tobacco leaves? The scientist who can make a GM chocolate that contains drugs is going to make a killing…

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 19, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The most surprising science story of 2008 has returned to the news today, with a follow up to the study that appeared to show cows have a magnetic sense.

As we reported last year:

An analysis of more than 8,000 cows claims they have a statistically significant preference to align themselves in a north-south direction. The team behind this study has also found a similar preference in deer, and believes the animals must be sensing the Earth's magnetic field.

Of course the researchers realised a claim like this would likely meet with some scepticism. So they decided to look at cows that happened to live near power lines, and the magnetic fields that come with them. As Nature’s story from last year noted, at-the-time-unpublished work seemed to show that cows near power lines were not aligned north-south.

This work, utilising satellite and aerial photographs of cows - and field observations of deer - near power lines has now been published.

“Whatever the underlying mechanism, our results provide further evidence that the recently described spontaneous directional preference in grazing and resting cattle and deer represents a case of magnetic alignment,” write Hynek Burda, of the University of Duisburg-Essen, and colleagues in PNAS. “The fact that animals grazing under or near high-voltage power lines were not commonly aligned but exhibited distinct alignment patterns beneath or in the vicinity of power lines trending in various magnetic directions clearly rules out a role of the sun compass in alignment behaviour of ruminants.”

The article will be available here later this week.

Headline watch
How Udderly Odd - TinySci
Power lines spark interest over effect on animals – Yorkshire Post
High-voltage power lines short-circuit cows' satnav – Scotsman
No bull: High voltage power lines can affect which direction grazing cows choose to face - KFSM

Image: paper author J. Cerveny

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 17, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

We have two ancient beasts for your delectation today, one large, one small.

Let’s start with the big one, and it really is a monster. Researchers from the University of Oslo’s Natural History Museum have uncovered the skull of a 147 million year-old marine reptile that measured 15 metres in length.

The pliosaur would have weighed in at 45 tonnes, say the researchers. That’s fifteen times the (fictional) weight of Jaws!

“There is nothing really comparable in the sea today,” says Jorn Hurum, one of the team behind the find (NY Times). “Thank God for that,” says I.

Continue reading "Little and large" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 17, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Times are not good for the biotech industry, a whole host of people are warning this week.

According to the European industry trade group, one in five small bio-tech firms could go to the wall this year. Interviews with industry figures conducted for the European Biopharmaceutical Enterprises group suggest that over 50 % of small and medium sized firms are under threat.

The major problem is that many of these companies are still in the early loss making stages of their development and credit is in short supply, says Reuters.

EBE president Carlo Incerti says one solution could be a bailout from the European Investment Bank. “This is not just about saving jobs in the short term, it’s about protecting Europe’s capacity to drive medical innovation,” he says (press release).

Things are no better in the US...

Continue reading "Bye-bye-biotech industry?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 17, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Financial Crisis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The recent rash of songs about science continues, with this example reaching us via Deep Sea News. At this rate I’m going to have to expand my knowledge of Roman numerals.

The New York Times informs us that, “The rapper on the left is Derrick Davis, a junior at Stanford. The rapper on the right is Tom McFadden, an instructor in the human biology program there.”

This is not the only example from these rapping researchers. Check out the awesome song about cane toads, I Just Want a Function.

Equally good are I'm going going back back to plasma membrane, Wanna be a... Scholar?, and Hi, Meiosis.

Continue reading "Songs about science XVII: gene regulators mount up" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 11, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A captive chimpanzee in Sweden has exhibited a remarkably human trait: detailed planning for a future act of violence.

Santino the chimp carefully collects concrete and stones in weapons caches to throw at visitors to his Furuvik zoo home. Mathias Osvath, of Lund University, says this is the first unambiguous demonstration of future planning by a non-human.

While other primates are known to fashion tools, Osvath says that previous examples could always be seen as responses to immediate needs, such as breaking a stick to fish in a termite nest due to hunger. In this case, he writes in Current Biology, “The chimpanzee has without exception been calm during gathering or manufacturing of the ammunition, in contrast to the typically aroused state during [throwing] displays. The gathering and manufacturing has only been observed during the hours before the zoo opened, excluding potential triggering from the presence of zoo visitors.”

Osvath told AP that, while he may be a very good forward planner, Santino’s execution is a little lacking. The animal is a poor shot who rarely manages to hit visitors. Still, he says, “It is very special that he first realizes that he can make these and then plans on how to use them.”

Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University in Atlanta, told the Washington Post, “People always assume that animals live in the present. This seems to indicate that they don't live entirely in the present.”

De Waal, told ABC News that similar behaviour has been observed in other apes. “I have seen apes line up faeces as future ammunition,” he says.

Sadly for Santino, CanWest reports that his aggressive behaviour “earned him a date on the surgeon’s table for castration last fall” in the hope that lower testosterone levels might curb his enthusiasm for stone throwing.

Headline watch
Arrest That Chimp! – Science Now
'Hail' from the chimp: zoo ape stockpiles stones to throw at visitors – CBC
Stone the crows! Santino the rock-throwing ape proves chimps plan ahead – Daily Mail

Image: stock photo / Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 10, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

At a meeting last weekend featuring Harvard University’s Origins of Life Initiative, synthetic biologist/systems biologist/sequencing guru/technobiology polymath George Church announced that his lab had taken an important step towards the creation of synthetic life by assembling a functional ribosome.

Ribosomes are molecular machines that read strands of RNA and translate the genetic code into proteins. They are exquisitely complex, and previous attempts to reconstitute a ribosome from its constituent parts – dozens of proteins along with several molecules of RNA – yielded poorly functional ribosomes, and even then succeeded only when researchers resorted to “strange conditions” that did not recapitulate the environment of a living cell, Church said.

In addition to applications in synthetic biology, creating a synthetic ribosome could improve industrial methods for making proteins without relying on cells. Having a tailor-made ribosome could also make it easier to chemically label proteins in situations where researchers don’t want to label the entire cell and all proteins in it.

And for Church, making a ribosome is a critical step in one of his pet projects: creating a “mirror image cell" by altering the stereochemistry of the molecules within.

Continue reading "Synthetic biologists prepare to leap through the looking glass" »

Posted by Heidi Ledford on March 10, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The oldest brain ever found was officially unveiled this week, in the journal PNAS.

Researchers at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility were using X-rays to image the inside of an ancient fish skull fossil when they discovered what they call “a strikingly brain-shaped structure” (press release, research paper - link live soon). They suggest the 300 million year old brain of the iniopterygian fish was mineralised due to microbes.

[This story may seem very familiar to those who were paying close attention to the recent AAAS conference.]

“Soft tissue has fossilized in the past, but it is usually muscle and organs like kidneys because of phosphate bacteria from the gut that permeates into tissue and preserves its features,” says paper author John Maisey, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City (LiveScience). “Fossilized brains are unusual, and this is by far the oldest known example.”

Continue reading "The world’s oldest brain" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 03, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The clever people at MIT have come up with rather excellent video of DNA transcription utilising one of the greatest inventions of the last 100 years: the humble Lego brick.

Another video along similar lines has been made for translation.

Of course, one Lego-based science video is never enough. Below the fold are some more internet Lego-science hits.

[Thanks to Mike for pointing us to this.]

Continue reading "Video: Lego DNA" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 03, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“I’m ecstatic – I feel as if Austria has become the European Cup winner in soccer,” enthused Austria’s environment minister Nikolaus Berlakovich yesterday, after European Union environment ministers voted overwhelmingly in favour of allowing both Austria and Hungary to keep their national bans on cultivation of the genetically-modified maize Mon810. The Wiener Zeitung headlined: ‘Triumph for Austria’.

The European Commission, on the other hand, was humiliatingly relegated. It had proposed that the two countries lift their bans which contravenes an EU directive to which all 27 EU member states are signed up. The directive allows only scientific arguments to exclude GM crops from cultivation, and allows no opt-outs. The Commission had rejected the two countries’ portfolios of scientific concerns as insufficient.

Continue reading "European nations win right to ban GM crops" »

Posted by Alison Abbott on March 03, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There is much excitement – and no small number of puns – greeting the news that ancient footprints found in Kenya show our distant ancestors were striding around on feet very like ours some 1.5 million years ago.

Writing in Science, researchers report that after laser scanning the sets of prints, they concluded these are “the oldest evidence of an essentially modern human–like foot anatomy”. While the famous Laetoli prints from Tanzania are substantially older, at 3.75 million years, those prints showed a more ape-like foot.

Study leader Matthew Bennett, of Bournemouth University in the UK, notes the importance of the find in the Times:

Now we know that 1.5 million years ago, Homo erectus had feet with an anatomy very similar to modern humans. It could essentially walk with the same biomechanical efficiency as you or I.

Continue reading "Ancient footprints make a big impression" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 27, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

If you’re enlisting the help of scientists to write a guide explaining genetically modified (GM) crops for the general public, should you declare in detail all their industrial interests?

Sense About Science (SAS), a UK charity, is being criticised for failing to do this in its recently published booklet, Making Sense of GM [pdf]. Anti-GM campaigners and academics, the Times Higher Education (THE) reports, say the guide’s potted biographies of its contributors don’t disclose fully their links to research institutes that receive biotech cash.

But the charity doesn’t think it’s done anything wrong.

Continue reading "Everything to declare? " »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on February 20, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a viral coat, all 5 million atoms of it. To be precise, it is a capsid, used to protect a virus from the defences of the cells it invades. It took three years to get the picture of the structure, by layering hundreds of x-ray diffraction images (press release). The work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

"Because many viruses use this type of capsid, understanding how it forms could lead to new approaches for antiviral therapies," lead researcher Jane Tao said. "It could also aid researchers who are trying to create designer viruses and other tools that can deliver therapeutic genes into cells."

The image has hit the mainstream thanks to Wired’s blog and ShortNews.com ran the story with no image. Weird.

Image: J Pan & Y J Tao / Rice University

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on February 18, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A massive haul of fossils has been unearthed from a car park near Los Angeles by the mysteriously named Project 23.

These fossils have been excavated from the famous the La Brea Tar Pits. The Page Museum, which oversees pit research, says the find is “so enormous that it could potentially rewrite the scientific account” of the area. ‘Project 23’ has so far produced over 700 specimens, including horse, bison, coyotes, dire wolves, and saber-toothed cats (press release).

As these are from the last ice age around 40,000 – 10,000 years ago, they are obviously not really a ‘Jurassic Car Park’. That headline was irresistible though.

The mysterious moniker comes from the fact that these animals were all carted out of the car park in 23 giant crates, weighing up to 56 tonnes.

Continue reading "Jurassic Car Park" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 18, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you’ve not had too much Darwin by now, here are some more stories that caught our collective Nature eyes.

In the Guardian, palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris writes:

[P]erhaps now is the time to rejoice not in what Darwin got right, and in demonstrating the reality of evolution in the context of entirely unexceptional natural processes there is no dispute, but what his inheritance is in terms of unfinished business.

Isn't it curious how evolution is regarded by some as a total, universe-embracing explanation, although those who treat it as a religion might protest and sometimes not gently. Don't worry, the science of evolution is certainly incomplete.

The New York Times profiles Richard Milner, the singing Darwin. “Officially, he is a science historian named Richard Milner, but he regularly turns into his hero on stage — complete with white beard, bowler and cape — in a one-man musical, ‘Charles Darwin: Live & In Concert’,” says the Times, which also has a video profile. Here him sing here.

Also in the Times, Carl Safina writes that “Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live”:

By propounding “Darwinism,” even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one “theory.” The ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” The point is that making a master teacher into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching. So let us now kill Darwin.

Darwin has also popped up on an internet site I’m told is very popular with young people at the moment. ‘Twitter’ lets you post short messages, similar to the ‘txts’ you can send via a cellular telephone.

“Thanks to all my well-wishers on my birthday,” says ‘cdarwin’.

“Happy Birthday to my co-discoverer,” says ‘arwallace’. Samuel Wilberforce is less magnanimous.

More
Secularist group posts 'Praise Darwin' billboards – USA Today
Google has a special Darwin’s 200th Birthday graphic (if it’s gone from the homepage, see here).

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 12, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A burst of genetic changes occurred around 10 million years ago in one of the ancestors we share with chimpanzees, with consequences that are being felt today.

A new analysis of the genomes of macaques, orang-utans, chimpanzees and humans shows that DNA segments in this ancestor began to make duplicate copies at a very high rate around ten million years ago, even though other mutation processes such as single letter changes were slowing.

“There’s a big burst of activity that happens where genomes are suddenly rearranged and changed,” says Evan Eichler, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

He adds, “Because of the architecture of the human genome, genetic material is constantly being added and deleted in certain regions. These are really like volcanoes in the genome, blowing out pieces of DNA.”

In Nature the team reports that this duplication spree occurred before humans and chimpanzees diverged, around 6 million years ago, but after the divergence from orang-utans 12-16 million years ago and the divergence from macaques prior to that. (See also this week’s news feature on human evolution: The other strand.)

Continue reading "‘Volcanoes in the genome’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 12, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Don’t forget to check out this week’s Nature, which is the second of our three Darwin 200 special issues. Highlights include:

Editorial: Humanity and evolution
Charles Darwin's thinking about the natural world was profoundly influenced by his revulsion for slavery.

News Feature: The other strand
Geneticists looked to the human genome to understand human evolution. But it's hard to interpret without considering the inheritance of culture, finds Erika Check Hayden.

Commentaries: Should scientists study race and IQ?
In the first of two opposing commentaries, Steven Rose argues that studies investigating possible links between race, gender and intelligence do no good. In the second, Stephen Ceci and Wendy M. Williams argue that such research is both morally defensible and important for the pursuit of truth.

Essay: A flight of fancy
Henry Nicholls wonders how things would be different had Charles Darwin given in to pressure from his publisher to rewrite Origin of Species into a popular book about pigeons.

Books and Arts: Poems from Darwin's descendant
Amid the many analyses of Darwin's life and work, a more intimate literary portrait emerges from the poetry of his great-great-granddaughter, Ruth Padel. Her series of poems on his life — six of which are reproduced here — evokes the emotion and drama of the naturalist's discoveries.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 12, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The UK’s Royal Mail is getting in on the Darwin 200 celebrations by issuing its own set of ten stamps.

Of the ten, six are jigsaw shaped, supposedly to symbolise the different areas that came together in his work. There are stamps for zoology, botany, geology, ornithology and anthropology, plus one of the great man’s head (below the fold).

There’s also this very pretty set of four, that comes together to make a map of the Galapagos.

Rather brilliantly, the Royal Mail sent giant versions of the stamps to the Zoo, where the animals were able to have a look.

“The distinctive jigsaw design of the stamps is a great way to link Darwin’s vast areas of research, while the special sheet is a beautiful representation of the Galapagos Islands,” says Julietta Edgar, head of Special Stamps at the Royal Mail (press release).

Darwin honoured on new British stamps – AFP
New stamps marking Darwin's birth – BBC

Continue reading "Darwin in stamps" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 12, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Declan Butler.

Today's newspapers are full of the supposed ‘news’ that the Vatican has reconciled Darwin and evolution as being compatible with Christian faith – see for example Vatican buries the hatchet with Charles Darwin and The Vatican claims Darwin's theory of evolution is compatible with Christianity, or search for “Vatican” AND “evolution” on Google News.

The reports stem from remarks made this morning by archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, at a press conference in Rome detailing a conference to be held in Rome 3-7 March – Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories: A critical appraisal 150 years after ‘The Origin of Species’ – on the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. The meeting intended to boost dialogue between religion and science on evolution.

Ravasi, however, had already made similar statements last September, when the conference was first announced – see for example Evolution fine but no apology to Darwin: Vatican. Moreover, Roman Catholic Church theology has long cohabited comfortably with the science of evolution, with the church itself endorsing evolution in 1950, although with the theological rider that it should be a hypothesis and not a doctrine. And in 1996, pope Jean John Paul II – the man who rehabilitated Galileo – fully embraced evolution (see Nature’s new piece from back then, Papal confession: Darwin was right about evolution).

Continue reading "The Origin of the Scoops" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 11, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Last Friday, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved its first drug produced by a genetically engineered animal. The drug, called ATryn, is produced by goats engineered to make the protein in their milk.

The approval ends a long struggle by… well several parties. The so-called “pharming” industry -- which aims to produce drugs in animals – struggled to convince investors to continue investing despite the absence of guidance on whether or how their drugs would eventually be approved. The FDA struggled to come up with a way to regulate the industry. And activists struggled to hold off the guidelines. (Europe, by the way, got its act together and approved ATryn over two years ago.)

ATryn is designated for use in patients with specific blood clotting disorders and its market will be relatively small. But although the drug itself is not likely to be a big money maker, the approval of ATryn brought a sigh of relief from pharming companies. “[It] really takes away one of the biggest issues that have always been on the table, which is how do regulatory agencies view this kind of technology,” Samir Singh of Pharming, a pharming company headquartered in Leiden, told The New York Times.

How about those investors? “Investors shrugged,” wrote Forbes' Matthew Herper in his beautifully titled blog post “Goats Make Drugs, World Doesn’t Change”. Stock in Massachusetts-based GTC Therapeutics, the company that produces ATryn, actually fell on Friday and is now trading at around $0.60 a share.

Posted by Heidi Ledford on February 09, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you haven't had enough Darwin yet, here are some more tidbits.

“I think in many respects Wallace was as talented, if not more talented, than Darwin.”
David Grimaldi, curator of invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, sings the praises of the poor man who has been forgotten in all this Darwin worship (Washington Post).

Previously
Darwin 200 - February 02, 2009
Darwin 200 redux

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 09, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Quotes of the day | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Here’s another selection from the ongoing Darwin 200 celebrations.

Everyone has a blog these days. This one is a novelty though: Emma Darwin – wife of Charles – has started blogging for the snappily titled UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology.

“On the occasion of my dear husband’s 200th birthday, and in response to the prodigious quantity of material and events marking the year, I am compelled to add my voice, soft though it may be, to the loudening din,” writes Emma (who may or may not be Karen James, of the Natural History Museum).

“… It grieves me to learn that some in these modern times think of him as a cold, hard man failing in – or even actively shunning – the preciousness of human life, for it was in its very cause that my husband worked so painstakingly to demonstrate that the bond of common descent is shared by all living things.”

Continue reading "Darwin 200 redux" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 06, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

In case you hadn’t noticed yet, we’re rapidly approaching the 200th birthday of Charlie Darwin. As the Darwin 200 celebrations become ever more frenzied, the Great Beyond will be rounding up the best of the world’s Darwin coverage, starting now.

Continue reading "Darwin 200" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 02, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The discovery of a fossil Asian turtle in the Canadian Arctic is leading some scientists to reconsider how these animals got to America.

According to researcher John Tarduno, of the University of Rochester, the fossil suggests that tropical turtles may have reached the New World from Asia not via Alaska but by coming directly over the poles.

“We’ve known there’s been an interchange of animals between Asia and North America in the late Cretaceous period, but this is the first example we have of a fossil in the High Arctic region showing how this migration may have taken place,” he says (press release).

“We’re talking about extremely warm, ice-free conditions in the Arctic region, allowing migrations across the pole.”

James Parham, who works at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and was not involved in the work, told Wired, “This paper is actually providing a route of dispersal for some of these animals. The story’s starting to slowly get pieced together.”

Continue reading "Tropical turtle’s Arctic travels" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 02, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the researchers behind last year’s pioneering stem cell windpipe transplant has revealed an early interest in medicine.

Anthony Hollander, of the University of Bristol, has revealed that as a child in 1973 he wrote to British children’s TV programme – and national institution – Blue Peter to request help, with better spelling than mine at age nine:

This may seem very strange, but I think I no how to make people or animals alive. Why Im teling you is because I cant get the things I need.

A list of what I need.
1. Diagram of how evreything works (inside youre body)
2. Model of a heart split in half, (both halvs)
3. The sort of sering [syringe] they yous for cleaning ears (Tsering must be very very clean)
4. Tools for cutting people open
5. Tools for stiches
6. Fiberglass box, 8 foot tall, 3 foot width.
7. Picture of a man showing all the arteries.

Continue reading "‘This may seem very strange, but I think I no [sic] how to make people or animals alive.’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 30, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Triceratops went head to head with their kin in prehistoric fights, according to new research.

Andrew Farke, of the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Palaeontology in California, says exactly how the dinosaurs put their three horns to use has been a matter of some debate. But by comparing damage on triceratops skulls to a related species, centrosaurus, he may have provided an answer.

Writing in PLOS One, Farke and colleagues report that triceratops have significantly more damage to their squamosal bone, part of the frill, than centrosaurus.

“Paleontologists have debated the function of the bizarre skulls of horned dinosaurs for years now. Some speculated that the horns were for showing off to other dinosaurs, and others thought that the horns had to have been used in combat against other horned dinosaurs,” says Farke (press release).

“Our findings provide some of the best evidence to date that Triceratops might have locked horns with each other, wrestling like modern antelope and deer.”

Continue reading "Triceratops tête à tête" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 28, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Roberta Kwok

The Texas State Board of Education appears to be of two minds over whether the merits of evolution should be debated in schools. On the one hand, board members got rid of a 20-year-old line in the science curriculum last week requiring that teachers cover the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories. On the other hand, that decision was immediately followed by a successful proposal to teach arguments "for and against" the idea that all organisms evolved from a common ancestor.

"How that differs from the old language of 'strengths and weaknesses' is not readily apparent," notes a New York Times editorial, which says the board "fumbled" the decision.

We've heard these arguments before. But Texas, the latest battleground state in the evolution curriculum controversy, is a bigger fish than most because it's so, well, big. The state has 4.7 million public school students (Houston Chronicle), making it one of the top textbook buyers in the country (New York Times). A Texas board decision could affect what publishers include in science textbooks nationwide.

The amendment to include arguments against common ancestry in the curriculum "could provide a small foothold for teaching creationist ideas and dumbing down biology instruction in Texas," says Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, a nonprofit that campaigned against the "strengths and weaknesses" requirement (Dallas Morning News). The other side begs to differ: "This isn't about religion," says board member Barbara Cargill, who supported the proposal to cover arguments against common descent (Houston Chronicle). "It's about science. We want to stick to the science."

A final vote on the curriculum is scheduled for March.

Image: Nature

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 27, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) is returning its HQ to the UK after being forced to move to Delaware in the US eight years ago. “We are an English company – we shouldn’t be based in America,” Andrew Baker, chairman and CEO is reported saying in the Telegraph.

HLS has survived despite being the subject of ongoing attacks from animal rights activists. The company does contract research for testing pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals, among other things, on animals. HLS was forced to relocate its headquarters to the US in 2001 after the Royal Bank of Scotland (now in a whole load of unrelated trouble) cut ties with the company because their staff were threatened. A list of shareholders in the company was obtained by animal rights activists, and many of those shareholders got rid of the shares. Unable to raise funds or hold a bank account in the UK apart from with the Bank of England, HLS moved to the US where shareholders were given more anonymity.

But recent trials of some of the activists have made the atmosphere in the UK better for HLS to return, although the economic climate is still pretty hostile.

Continue reading "Homecoming for Huntingdon Life Sciences" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on January 21, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Heidi Ledford

Our DNA sequence may not be the only ‘genetic’ information that we inherit from our parents, according to a study published online this week by Nature Genetics. An analysis of identical and fraternal twins shows that epigenetic changes – in the form of a chemical modification to DNA called methylation – are also passed on to the next generation.

DNA methylation can affect gene expression, and changes in DNA methylation have been linked to everything from normal developmental changes to illnesses including cancer. Zachary Kaminsky at the University of Toronto and his colleagues analyzed DNA methylation in different cells types taken from 114 identical twins and 80 fraternal twins. The researchers found that identical twins were more likely to share DNA methylation patterns.

Now, it’s still possible that these DNA methylation patterns are more similar in identical twins simply because the underlying DNA sequence is more similar. (Methylation typically occurs where a ‘C’ lies next to a ‘G’ in the DNA sequence.) But the authors argue that their results, combined with previous data from animal models, suggest that DNA methylation is inherited.

Continue reading "The same, but different" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on January 20, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Heidi Ledford

Watch out, woolly mammoth: the Tasmanian tiger is hot on your heels. Using DNA samples culled from museum specimens, researchers have sequenced DNA from the long-extinct Tasmanian tiger. The results were published online this week by Genome Research.

The ‘tiger’ – not really a tiger but a dog-like marsupial with charming stripes – has been extinct since 1936, but it’s not the first time that researchers have decided to muck around with its DNA. Last May, scientists in the United States and Australia plucked a DNA sequence from preserved Tasmanian tiger tissue and inserted it into transgenic mice.

Now, a different team has sequenced the full mitochondrial genome using samples from two ‘tigers’. The results hint at a high degree of inbreeding in the Tasmanian tiger population, a sad but common scenario for a species heading for extinction. The work has generated lots of media coverage (eg. The Scientist; Reuters) and the usual speculation about possible resurrection of the species. (They’ll be “freak shows”, worries The Examiner.)

Pennsylvania State University researcher Stephan Schuster has worked on both the ‘tiger’ and the woolly mammoth genome projects, and has referred to his approach of sequencing from museum specimens as ‘museomics’. There was a time, years ago, when a new ‘omics’ word would often be met with rolled eyes and a groan in the lab break room. Since then, I feel like many of us have come to accept increasingly contrived ’omics as just a fact of life in an era of high-throughput biology. But Jonathan Eisen (who himself coined the term ‘phylogenomics’) is not so complacent -- check out this posting on his latest award, “Worst New Omics Word Award”, and his list of new proposed ’omics.

Image: wikipedia

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 15, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Reports in the British media that grant applications to create hybrid human – animal embryos for research were turned down on moral grounds, have been rejected by the funding bodies and scientists involved.

The story broke in the Independent newspaper on Monday, which claimed Stephen Minger, a leading stem cell scientist at King’s College London, said that the grant applications may have been blocked by scientists on the funding committees who are morally opposed to the creation of cloned hybrid embryos.

But when Nature spoke to Minger he said the Independent misinterpreted his comments, adding he did not have any evidence that moral objections led to his proposal being rejected.

“I was not saying that religious or moral opposition to the proposal led to its rejection,” he said.

Continue reading "Moral objections to hybrid embryo research claims rejected " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on January 14, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The impact of human hunting on wildlife populations doesn’t end with the individual animal deaths — it also forces harmful evolutionary changes on animal populations, according to new research.

Although previous research has shown that hunted species evolve in response to predation, it was unclear whether hunting affects the rate of evolution.

Thus, evolutionary biologist Chris Darimont of the University of California, and his colleagues assessed how morphological characteristics of 29 species — including fish, limpets, snails, bighorn sheep, and two plants — changed over time.

Their findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that human-hunted species have undergone the most rapid change, and that this has forced dramatic shifts in features such as average size and age of reproductive animals.

"The public knows we often harvest far too many fish, but the threat goes above and beyond numbers," Darimont said in a press release. "We're changing the very essence of what remains, sometimes within the span of only two decades. We are the planet's super-predator."

Continue reading "Human hunting speeds up evolution of prey" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on January 13, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Drug regimes that increase the production of stem cells may circumvent some present limitations to a stem cell therapy, a new study suggests.

Stem cells have been hailed of late as the cures of disease and the saviours of patients. Yet researchers still face many obstacles before these new therapeutic tools can be put to work. For instance, what is the best way to generate stem cells, and how do you get them into the patients who need them? A study in Cell Stem Cell now shows that we may be able to side-step both of these issues by spurring bone marrow to boost stem cell production.

Previous studies have shown that treatment with granulocyte colony stimulating factor followed by recently approved Genzyme Corporation drug Mozobil can increase blood stem cell production. Sara Rankin, of Imperial College London, and her colleagues now show in mice that a different regime — endothelial growth factor followed by Mozobil — induces bone marrow to pump out two other types of stem cell.

Continue reading "Drug combo boosts stem-cell production" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on January 09, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mosquitoes looking for love adjust the sound of their whine to woo partners, researchers report.

Male and female mosquitoes both have distinctive flight tones, which they make be beating their wings at different speeds. Whereas female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes beat at 400 Hz, males beat at 600 Hz. Surprisingly, Ronald Roy of Cornell University in Ithaca and his colleagues now report in Science that love struck males and females increase their wing beat frequency to a 1,200 Hz — a shared harmonic (or multiple) — when they are brought near one another.

Because mosquitoes normally zip around, unusual measures were taken for the study, Hoy told NPR.

First, the insects were anesthetized. "You make them a little bit chilly," Hoy says, "then they don't fly or walk around." Next, he and his colleagues applied a small amount of superglue to the backs of the test mosquitoes, then affixed them to a tiny tether and suspended them in the air.

Once the mosquitoes began to beat their wings and produce their gender-specific flight tones, the scientists moved the insects close to each other.

The authors also found that mosquitoes’ Johnston’s organs — their equivalent of ears — are sensitive up to 2,000 Hz. These findings challenge previous conceptions that mosquitoes can’t hear anything above 800 Hz, and might even be deaf.

Continue reading "Amorous mosquitoes make sweet harmonious whine" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on January 09, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Giant flying reptiles took off by running along on all four limbs rather than using a bird-like method to get airborne, according to a new study by Michael Habib.

“Using all four legs, it takes less than a second to get off of flat ground, no wind, no cliffs,” says the Johns Hopkins scientist (press release). “This was a good thing to be able to do if you lived in the late Cretaceous period and there were hungry tyrannosaurs wandering around.”

Habib thinks pterosaurs – which are definitely not dinosaurs – had much stronger ‘arms’ than ‘legs’. Comparing the bone strength of birds and pterosaur species he suggests that the reptiles folded their wings and hobbled around on their knuckles and did what would probably have been a highly comical series of “leap-frogging long-jumps” before sticking out their wings and taking off.

“They kind of pitch forward at first, the legs kick off first, then the arms take off,” he says (AP).

Not everyone is convinced. Sankar Chatterjee, of Texas Tech, told MSNBC he still believes they either jumped off cliffs or ran down and incline on two legs to get flying. However Mark Witton, of the University of Portsmouth, says he’s behind Habib:

The idea that pterosaurs were weather- or topography-dependent for takeoff and that they weren't strong flapping fliers - being essentially giant gliders - just doesn't make any sense. For one thing, the biggest pterosaurs, like the 500-pound critters Mike's been playing with, are often found miles and miles and miles from the nearest cliff:

… In fact, Mike's research was a big relief to me: My own research was pointing to the very controversial conclusion that some of the biggest pterosaurs were massing in the 250-kilogram / 500-pound ballpark, so when he told me that he'd found a way to get such a critter into the air I was very happy.

The research has been published in Zitteliana, but doesn’t appear to be online.

Image: Mark Witton.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 08, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Following last year’s woolly mammoth genome in Nature and the raft of coverage about the potential for Jurassic Park-style resurrections, the British press is getting in a tizzy over a list of 10 extinct animals we could see again.

The list – which includes Neanderthals and the dodo – has been produced by New Scientist, which says:

Assuming that we will develop the necessary technology, we have selected 10 extinct creatures that might one day be resurrected. Our choice is based not just on feasibility, but also on each animal's "megafaunal charisma" - just how exciting the prospect of resurrecting these animals is.

Even those quoted in the article are not entirely convinced by the choices. “I find the idea of resurrecting the Neanderthal so ridiculous that any speculation on surrogate mothers is superfluous,” says Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Sadly the magazine has not attempted to factor in another key consideration, namely how tasty these things might be to eat.

Full list and coverage below the fold.

Continue reading "The Lazarus list " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 08, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Like the cast of a cheap zombie movie, British scientists want your braaaaaaains.

At a press conference in London, researchers said a lack of healthy and diseased brains was holding back work on Alzheimer's, autism and other conditions.

“There’s a great opportunity to facilitate important research to discover cures and treatments which would go unfulfilled if we don't increase the number of brains available for research,” Paul Francis, from King’s College London (Daily Telegraph).

Payam Rezaie, of the Neuropathology Research Laboratory at the Open University, says the situation is dire (BBC):

For autism, we only have maybe 15 or 20 brains that have been donated that we can do our research on. That is drastically awful. We would need at least 100 cases to get meaningful data. But that is just one example. A lot of research is being hindered by this restriction.

Only the Guardian seems to have noticed that a special “telephone helpline” will be set up to help people donate their brains to science. Always willing to lead by example, I will be offering up my brain to journalism researchers, provided that the helpline doesn’t have one of those awful systems which asks you to, “Press one to donate your brain to a chemist, press two to donate your brain to a biologist, press three to donate your brain to a medical researcher.”

More
Nature's Kerri Smith visited a brain bank at UCL for last month’s NeuroPod.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 07, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Researchers have discovered the first vertebrate to use mirrors rather than lenses to focus light in its eyes.

In this month’s Current Biology, Hans-Joachim Wagner, of Tübingen University in Germany, reports that the deep-sea spookfish (Dolichopteryx longipes) focuses light onto its retina using a multilayer stack of reflective plates.

“This is the first report of an ocular image being formed in a vertebrate eye by a mirror,” the research team write.

The paper was published early online in December when New Scientist noted that the fish appears to have four eyes – two looking up and two looking down. However, “It turns out that the spookfish actually has just two eyes, but each eye has two parts, one looking upwards and the other down. … The spookfish is the only deep-sea fish with eyes that have been shown to produce a focused image when looking both up and down.”

In a new press release, research member Julian Partridge, of the University of Bristol, says, “In nearly 500 million years of vertebrate evolution, and many thousands of vertebrate species living and dead, this is the only one known to have solved the fundamental optical problem faced by all eyes - how to make an image - using a mirror.”

Of course, as the paper notes, invertebrates have been known to use mirrors for ages.

Image: Tammy Frank, Habor Branch Oceanographic Institution

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 07, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pink Iguana discovered on Galapagos Islands, say the headlines. What the stories only get to later, if at all, is that they were discovered over 20 years ago.

Park rangers first spotted the land-based rosada (pink in Spanish) iguana in 1986. Now, Gabriele Gentile, of Rome's University Tor Vergata, and his colleagues report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that these reptiles represent a “unique” species of iguana.

On the basis of genetic analysis, the researchers show that the pink iguanas are genetically distinct from the two known species of land iguana found on the Galapagos — Conolophus pallidus and Conolophus subcristatus — and estimate that they diverged some 5.7 million years ago.

Continue reading "Newly discovered iguanas not so newly discovered" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on January 06, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The main suspect behind the US anthrax attacks is back in the news again. Bruce Ivins killed himself last year as authorities were building a case against him over the 2001 attacks that left five dead.

The New York Times has taken an extended look at Ivins:

That examination found that unless new evidence were to surface, the enormous public investment in the case would appear to have yielded nothing more persuasive than a strong hunch, based on a pattern of damning circumstances, that Dr. Ivins was the perpetrator.

Focused for years on the wrong man, the [FBI] missed ample clues that Dr. Ivins deserved a closer look. Only after a change of leadership nearly five years after the attacks did the bureau more fully look into Dr. Ivins’s activities. That delay, and his death, may have put a more definitive outcome out of reach.

AP has, like the Times, been poring over documents from the case. It says records from the Frederick Police Department show Ivins “tormented his wife with rudeness and behaved erratically in the weeks before the Army scientist took his own life by overdosing on Tylenol”.

Previously from Nature
Did anthrax mailer act alone? - US senator Patrick Leahy says he does not believe the FBI theory that researcher Bruce Ivins acted alone in carrying out the 2001 anthrax attacks in the US, 19 September 2008.
Too close for comfort - Nancy Haigwood, director of the Oregon National Primate Research Center, describes her encounters with anthrax suspect Bruce Ivins, 21 August 2008.
FBI to reveal anthrax data - Science of case will be submitted to peer-reviewed journals, 19 August 2008.
Anthrax: the FBI's case - The US Department of Justice today released a set of documents describing how its investigators linked Bruce Ivins, who died last week (Los Angeles Times), to the 2001 anthrax mailings, 06 August 2008.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 06, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Buzzing bees protect plants from pesky caterpillars, providing yet another example of the intricate and often unexpected linkages that make up food webs.

Leaf-eating caterpillars are the bane of gardeners and farmers. However, while these pesty predators search for tasty plants, they are hunted by carnivorous wasps. Consequently, caterpillars keep bristling sensory hairs alert for attacks from above and drop to the ground when they sense danger.

Biologist Jurgen Tautz of Biozentrum University in Bavaria, Germany, realized that the caterpillars' defence mechanism was not “fine-tuned" and suspected that “caterpillars cannot distinguish between hunting wasps and harmless bees." Thus, Tautz wondered whether bees might affect pest foraging behaviour (press release).

As reported in Current Biology, Tautz and his colleague Michael Rostas set up small tents that contained pepper and soya plants and voracious beet armyworm caterpillars. Unsurprisingly, the insects climbed the plants and devoured the foliage. When bees were introduced into the tents, however, the caterpillars stayed grounded, and hungry.

Continue reading "Buzz off, caterpillars!" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 23, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cedric the Tasmanian devil has developed cancer, leaving researchers scrambling to find new strategies to save the endangered species.

Tasmanian devils are being decimated by a fatal and infectious cancer that spreads when one animal bites another. Wild population sizes have plummeted by 60% in the past 10 years, and experts predict that these feisty marsupials may be extinct within 20 years if no solution is found.

Researchers suspected earlier this year that one lucky devil, Cedric, was immune to the cancer, spurring hope that the “devil’s could be their own saviours”. A breeding programme, which would have seen Cedric’s cancer-resistant progeny repopulating the wild, was initiated.

Cedric has now developed two cancerous tumours on his face, however.

“It was very deflating, very, very disappointing,” cancer researcher Greg Woods from the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, told ABC news.

The tumours have been surgically removed and Cedric is expected to make a full recovery. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the breeding programme, which has been put on hold.

Top image: a Tasmanian devil (not Cedric)/ Getty.

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 22, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dinosaur dads used to guard the nest and look after the kids, researchers have concluded, after comparing the sizes of dinosaur clutches with those of modern-day reptiles and birds.

While studying Troodon formosus, Oviraptor philoceratops and Citipati osmolskae — three species of bird-like dinosaurs — David Varricchio, a paleontologist at Montana State University in Bozeman, and his colleagues made a curious observation. "By volume, these dinosaurs were laying clutches that were two to three times larger than what would be expected for their adult body size," Varricchio told National Geographic.

They examined the sizes of clutches from 400 species of reptiles and birds. Clutches that were cared for by dads were the largest, followed by clutches that were cared for by mothers. Clutches that were cared for by mother–father pairs were the smallest. These findings, they report in Science, suggest that because Oviraptor, Citipati and Troodon clutches were so large, males may have been the primary care providers.

While journalists delight in the “softer side” of dinosaur culture (Reuters, Globe and Mail), these findings have implications for today’s bird watchers — they suggest that the primary paternal care system of some modern-day birds might be an evolutionary relic from ancestral dinosaurs.

Top image: Bill Parsons.

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 19, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Anna Petherick

Cambridge University opened a big black Physics of Medicine centre this week, inviting Nobel Prize winner Sir Aaron Klug along for the plaque-revealing ceremony.

The swish new centre is in the rapidly developing West Cambridge site, which also houses the William Gates Building computing laboratory. The Physics of Medicine building makes the next door Cavendish laboratory—where most of the university’s physics research happens—look rather short and 1970s-shabby.

Athene Donald, deputy head of physics, will run the new center. She was recently profiled in The Observer and on BBC Radio 4 after being made a laureate of the UNESCO/L’Oreal-sponsored Women in Science awards.

The centre aims to become the place to go if you want to research anything biophysical, from tissue scaffolds to the properties of the eye’s optical fibres.

Top image: The new centre, with Sir Aaron Klug in the far left. University of Cambridge/Philip Mynott.

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 19, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Via the Panda’s Thumb blog, here comes another science song for your delectation.

Tiktaalik (Your Inner Fish), by the Indoorfins, concerns the strange ‘fishapod’ fossil that is halfway between the gutter and the stars fish and land-dwellers. It was commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania’s reading project on Neil Shubin’s book Your Inner Fish.

Shubin discovered the Tiktaalik fossil, and is commemorated in this song:

From the water to the land I;
Learn to swim and learn to stand I'm;
Found here by the hands of Neil Shubin.
Carry me home;
To find the Inner fish unknown

Previously on Songs about Science
Songs about science
Songs of science part II
Songs about science part III: geology
Songs about science part IV: GeekPop08
Songs about science part V: singing scientists
Songs about science part VI: ‘Don’t go messing with our telescope’
Songs about science VII: ‘It’s a long way from Amphioxus’
Songs about pseudo-science
Songs about science part VIII: the astrobiology rap
Songs about science IX: Rollin’ to the Future
Songs about science X: drilling’s killer songs
Songs about science XI: Charlie Darwin

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 16, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sad news from the squid world. The awesome, though slightly terrifying, Humboldt squid is not going to do well as the oceans acidify.

Driven by increased emissions of carbon dioxide, the world’s oceans are likely to be increasingly acidic in the next 100 years. When researchers Brad Seibel and Rui Rosa exposed Humboldt (Dosidicus gigas) to these levels the animals got lazy, with metabolic rates down 31% and activity levels down 45%, they report in PNAS.

The squid spend their days in the deep ocean where there isn’t much oxygen, but they recover in well-oxygenated near-surface waters at night, explains University of Rhode Island researcher Seibel (press release). But low oxygen levels in deep waters could expand to shallower depths and increased temperatures and carbon dioxide levels of surface waters could mean trouble

“In the future, the habitable window between low oxygen at depth and acidified and warmer waters at the surface will grow narrower,” says Rosa (BBC). “The net result will be that the squid may become more susceptible to predators, less able to capture prey, or may be forced to migrate elsewhere, altering the oceanic food web.”

More squid news below

Continue reading "Super squid special" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 16, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Seven genes have been newly linked to obesity in humans, thanks to two big sequence-sifting studies published in Nature Genetics this week (Times, Financial Times). The Icelandic company deCODE Genetics has the list of seven genetic variants in their paper, and six - including one the deCODE team says was already known - were found by an academic consortium with the happy acronym of GIANT.

The results sound as though 'mind over matter' applies even in the biologically big-boned: five of these genes are expressed in the brain.

"Until 2007, no genetic associations had been found for 'common obesity', but today almost all those we have uncovered are likely to influence brain function,” says Ines Barroso of GIANT (press release on Science Daily). Her colleague Joel Hirschhorn concludes, “Inherited variation in appetite regulation may have something to do with predisposition to obesity.”

Continue reading "Genes found for thinking yourself thin" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on December 15, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An ancient amphibian that roamed the earth and its lakes 210 million years ago may have had the world's most bizarre bite — rather than opening its mouths by lowering its bottom jaw, like other vertebrates, Gerrothorax pulcherrimus would raise its upper jaw.

Or, according to Reuters, “it lifted the top of its head in a way that looked a lot like lifting the lid of a toilet seat”.

Palaeontologist Farish Jenkins, of Harvard University, and his colleagues published their finding on this abnormal amphibian's upside-down bite in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“It’s the ugliest animal in the world,” Jenkins told Reuters.

Continue reading "Amphibian's upside-down bite bites" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 15, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A European court has fined France 10 million Euros ($12.9 million) for failing to amend its laws on genetically modified crops and foods.

European Union passed a directive in 2001 that regulates the use of GM crops, including how GM crops are grown for crop and seed production and how GM crops are imported. Individual European governments were supposed to integrate the law into their own national legislation by 2002, but France has repeatedly dragged its feet.

The European Court of Justice has now issued a statement saying that the "unlawful conduct repeatedly engaged in by France in the GMOs sector is of such a nature as to require the adoption of a dissuasive measure, such as a lump sum payment".

Continue reading "France fined over GM law" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 10, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dogs get jealous when given unequal rewards for their faithful obedience, according to a new PNAS paper being mediafied with gusto.

In solo dog-on-human tests, pooches trained to ‘shake hands’ will offer a paw gratis, say researchers at the University of Vienna’s Clever Dog Lab. But if a nearby dog gets a treat for each shake while they go unrewarded, they’ll act upset and refuse to comply.

"Animals react to inequity; to avoid stress, we should try to avoid treating them differently," said study leader Friederike Range (AP).

The Independent, which clearly spares no expense for doggie mind-reading, concludes: “Canines are capable of withdrawing their co-operation and friendship if they see another dog get tasty sausage morsels that they feel they deserve.” New Scientist goes for the clever-but-inaccurate headline “Jealous dogs don’t play ball”.

The study seems less important for sociobiology than for dinner conversation fodder (watch out for biased distribution of under-table scraps). But the doggy envy is being compared to that of capuchin monkeys, the only other non-humans found to have a sense of equity – Scientific American summarizes this nicely.

The researchers are now rearing wolf pups for further research, to see if domestication causes jealousy. But could there be other influences? “[T]he green-eyed monster which doth mock/ The meat it feeds on” sounds like more of a cat thing to me.

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Anna Barnett on December 09, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A waterproof rice that can survive more than 2 weeks of total submersion has aced field tests and is nearly ready for official release, it was announced recently.

Researchers discovered 13 years ago that the gene sub1A makes rice plants flood resistant — rather than extending stems and leaves to try to escape a flood, plants with sub1a become dormant and conserve energy during flooding and then thrive when the floodwaters recede.

Annual flooding currently results in losses of US$1 billion worth of rice in South and South-East Asia. In Bangladesh and India, up to 4 million tonnes of rice, enough to feed 30 million people, is lost each year to flooding.

Continue reading "Waterproof rice coming soon" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 08, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Asher Mullard

A European agency has rejected an appeal for a patent on developing human embryonic stem cells.

The proposed patent, submitted by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, sought to protect a method used to culture embryonic stem cells, developed by stem cell pioneer James Thomson.

“Decisive in the [appeal board] ruling was the application's claim regarding human stem cell cultures,” says a statement from the European Patent Office. “The [board] decided that under the European Patent Convention it is not possible to grant a patent for an invention which necessarily involves the use and destruction of human embryos.”

Continue reading "European stem cell patent fails, again" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 28, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It was with a heavy heart that this correspondent read yesterday (BBC report by Sarah Mukherjee) that numbers of fungi experts (mycologists) in the UK are dwindling. Within ten years, according to scientists from the Centre for Agricultural Bioscience International, in Oxfordshire, all our fungi experts will be gone, never to be replaced.

The news has also reached the ears of Steve Connor at the Independent and was deemed so important to Sarah Mukherjee at the BBC that she wrote two stories about it.

Mushroomers have an amazing job. I honestly have no idea why young people wouldn’t be inspired to research fungi. New species are still being discovered, and you can make very funny jokes. Like calling yourself a “fungi to be with”.

For a rather bizarre round up of why fungi are important check out this article from the BBC.

Nature News reported on an historical line of fungi experts, beginning with Edward Gange, the fungal recorder for the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, whose son is also a fungus expert – see this news story from last year, and John Whitfield’s take on his own story. Let’s hope that the UK’s expertise in fungi is not reliant only on the Gange family in future.

Image of the fly agaric fungus: Wellcome library, London

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on November 28, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Great Beyond has sniffed out some great science news for dog lovers.

First up: New Scientist reports from an American Physical Society meeting in Texas that canines’ amazing sense of smell is all down to the slime on their noses. Apparently the mucus layer on wet dog noses absorbs some molecules faster than others. Now Brent Craven of Pennsylvania State University has used MRI images and computer models to show some molecules are detected at different points in the doggy airways.

“We’ve shown that the sorting out of the different odorants before they even get to the receptors is ... important,” says Craven.

All that super-smell-sense comes in handy when you’re a dog like Tucker, who works for researchers from the University of Washington. Tucker has the glamorous job of standing in the bows of a research boat and sniffing out whale excrement, it was reported last week.

The Seattle Times says:

When Tucker finds what researchers are looking for, he gets to play with his ball. So he is a highly motivated tracker — and in the summers of 2006 and 2008, he helped track down some of 130 samples of scat from orca whales in Puget Sound's J, K and L pods.

Hormone levels in the excrement show that Puget Sound’s resident orcas are nutritionally deprived, says Sam Wasser, director of the UW’s Center for Conservation Biology.

Finally, spare a thought for Matthew Marcum, whose dog blasted him with a shotgun. “He’s a good dog. It’s just one of those things. It’s an accident,” Marcum told The Oregonian.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 27, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The theory that the huge ancient cave bear died off around 15,000 years ago has been challenged by a new paper.

Martina Pacher and Anthony Stuart claim that Ursus spelaeus likely went extinct around 27,8000 years ago, and its problem was an ice-age triggered food shortage, not nasty men with pointy sticks.

“Its highly specialised mode of life, especially a diet of high-quality plants, and its restricted distribution left it vulnerable to extinction as the climate cooled and its food source diminished,” says Pacher, of the University of Vienna (press release).

Continue reading "Humanity off the hook for cave bear extinction" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 26, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Amphibian experts gathered today at the Zoological Society of London to hear about the sorry state of the world’s frogs, toads, newts, salamanders and caecilians.

“I can hardly think of a more important subject for us to be covering today,” ZSL’s director general Lesley Dickie Ralph Armond* told the gathered scientists. “Human intervention is essential for the survival of a vast range of amphibian species.”

While much has been made of the nasty infectious disease chytridiomycosis, Angus Carpenter of the University of East Anglia told the symposium of another problem: the global amphibian trade.

Data on species imported into countries and declared under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species between 1985 and 2008 show that over 100 million frogs were traded for meat, making over 26,000,000 kg of meat in total.

In the same timeframe 617,000 individual frogs were traded, mostly for the pet trade.

Continue reading "The international amphibian trade blues" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 20, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week’s copy of Nature contains a paper that may far in the future help with the return of a woolly face from the past.

“Here we describe 4.17 billion bases (Gb) of sequence from several mammoth specimens, 3.3 billion (80%) of which are from the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) genome and thus comprise an extensive set of genome-wide sequence from an extinct species,” write Webb Miller of Penn State University, and his colleagues.

It’s only the genome of a woolly mammoth!

So does this mean the lumbering beasts could soon be roaming a zoo near you? In another part of this issue of Nature, as part of our Darwin 200 coverage, Henry Nicholls says ‘Let's make a mammoth’:

It would be a huge undertaking ... . Perhaps the whole idea will remain too strange, too expensive, too impractical, even too unappealing for anyone to take seriously.

But the fact that just 15 years ago cloning mammals was confidently ruled out by many as being impractical should give people pause before saying any such thing is impossible. On Darwin's 200th birthday in 2009, reoriginating extinct animal species will still be a fantasy. By 2059, who knows what may have returned, rebooted, to walk the Earth?

More tusk-tastic coverage below the fold

Continue reading "Researchers complete mammoth task" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 20, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A paper published this week in the Royal Society’s Proc B* journal details a new species of primitive turtle, Eileanchelys waldmani, and helps narrow down when the shelly beasts took to the waves. From a block of rock from the Isle of Skye, off the Scottish coast, researchers extracted four well preserved turtle skeletons.

“Although the majority of modern turtles are aquatic forms, it has been convincingly demonstrated that the most primitive turtles from the Triassic, around 210 million years ago, were exclusively terrestrial,” says paper author Jérémy Anquetin, of the Natural History Museum, London and UCL (press release).

“Until the discovery of Eileanchelys, we thought that adaptation to aquatic habitat might have appeared among primitive turtles but we had no fossil evidence of that. Now, we know for sure that there were aquatic turtles around 164 million years ago.”

As if this wasn’t enough, the researchers have provided an awesome – if slightly over the top – illustration of what life might have been like on Skye all those years ago (full image below the fold).

Continue reading "When turtles took to the seas" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 19, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A 4600-year-old mass grave in Germany contains the oldest proven ‘nuclear family’, say genetic researchers.

Discovered in 2005, the graves near Eulau contained a number of adults and children who appeared to have met a violent end. Wolfgang Haak, who now works at the The Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, and colleagues analysed the genetic make-up of these individuals.

“A direct child-parent relationship was detected in one burial, providing the oldest molecular genetic evidence of a nuclear family,” they write in PNAS (link live soon). “...Their unity in death suggests a unity in life.”

The New York Times notes that the fact all the individuals appeared to have died at the same time was a hint that they met a sudden end. There’s also the fractured skulls and an arrowhead in one of their spines. The Times says Haak suggests that:

Adolescents and young adults were either not present — perhaps they were working in fields — or were able to escape, while younger children and older adults were killed. But then the survivors returned and, with intimate knowledge of the relationships among the dead, properly buried them.

He told the BBC, “You feel some kind of sympathy for them, it’s a human thing, somebody must have really cared for them. Normally you should be careful in archaeological research not to allow feelings in that make us base judgements on modern ideas, we don’t know how hard daily life was back there and if there was any space for love.”

More from this week’s PNAS
“A hydrologic and economic analysis of the Upper Rio Grande basin in the Southwest, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that subsidies and other policies that encourage conservation methods like drip irrigation can actually increase water consumption,” says the NY Times.

“Two popular leukemia drugs, Gleevec and Sutent, kept lab mice from developing type 1 diabetes and put 80 percent of diabetic mice in remission, an international team said on Monday,” says Reuters.

Photo courtesy of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS (2008).

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 18, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

English music collective Chumbawamba have stopped singing truly awful songs about the UK’s drinking culture long enough to pen this ditty about Charles Darwin.

“It’s probably one of very few songs about Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution,” says one of the band. “Quite good really at a time when they’re talking about teaching creationism in schools. ... Rather imaginatively this song is also called ‘Charlie’.”

Full lyrics for ‘Charlie’ can be found on the Pharyngula blog, which drew it to our attention. It’s not a patch on Darwin in Dub though.

More musical Darwin
DJ Darwin – “a world of musical creatures which are living in a system of death driven evolution - with a slightly sexist division of Male and Female creatures, respectively functioning with beats and melodies genes.”
Evolution (Use Your Brain) by My Poor Kevin

Previously on Songs about Science
Songs about science
Songs of science part II
Songs about science part III: geology
Songs about science part IV: GeekPop08
Songs about science part V: singing scientists
Songs about science part VI: ‘Don’t go messing with our telescope’
Songs about science VII: ‘It’s a long way from Amphioxus’
Songs about pseudo-science
Songs about science part VIII: the astrobiology rap
Songs about science IX: Rollin’ to the Future
Songs about science X: drilling’s killer songs

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 17, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The distinguishing feature of a male fiddler crab is the giant claw that he waves in a suggestive fashion at females or in a threatening fashion at other males. But it turns out that some males’ claws may be rather less distinguished than they appear. Some of them are faking it!

If a male loses his massive pinching device in a fight or to a predator he can grow a new one. Some species, though, grow new claws that look impressive but are basically useless.

“Males size each other up before fights, and displaying the big claw is a very important part of this process,” says Simon Lailvaux of the University of New South Wales (press release). “What’s really interesting about these 'cheap' claws is that other males can’t tell them apart from the regular claws.”

Lailvaux and colleagues have just published a study in Functional Ecology showing that regenerated claws of Uca mjoebergi fiddler crabs are “dishonest signals” as they have less closing force and less pull-resisting force. Both are crucial in fights.

Continue reading "Your cheatin’ claw" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 13, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Shar Pei dog is famous for its wrinkles. But hidden within the folds is the story of a genetic mutation enhanced by inbreeding, and a skin disorder.

Researchers in Barcelona have now discovered how this disorder, mucinosis, originated in the dogs, and they hope that their results will, they say, help in understanding nasty disorders like Familial Mediterranean Fever, as well as aging processes (press release).

Lluis Ferrer and Anna Bassols from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona discovered that mucinosis in Shar Peis is caused by a build up of hyaluronic acid in skin cells. This acid is found in the spaces between tissue cells.

In the dogs, hyaluronic acid is produced in abnormally high amounts because of the overexpression of the HAS2 enzyme. This is one of three enzymes responsible for the acid's production in mammals. The ultimate consequence is that too much mucin builds up under the skin, leading to the big, furry folds on the skin of the Shar Pei.

The inbreeding that Shar Peis have been subject to could actually help to work out how mucinosis is inherited, the researchers say.

This seems to make it clear that a bit of botox isn’t going to be any use to the Shar Pei at all.

Image by M.Peinado courtesy of Flickr

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on November 12, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There’s huge excitement in the press about newly engineered immune cells that can damage HIV, despite the virus’s disguises. Writing in Nature Medicine, scientists from the US and UK report making T cells that bind to the HIV-1 strain of the virus 450 times more strongly than natural T cells.

“The T-cell receptor is nature’s way of scanning and removing infected cells – it is uniquely designed for the job but probably fails in HIV because of the tremendous capability of the virus to mutate,” says Bent Jakobsen, paper author and chief scientific officer at the company which owns the technology, Adaptimmune (press release 1).

“Now we have managed to engineer a receptor that is able to detect HIV’s key fingerprints and is able to clear HIV infection in the laboratory. If we can translate those results in the clinic, we could at last have a very powerful therapy on our hands.”

Continue reading "‘Souped-up, pimped up, bionic assassin cells search-and-destroy HIV’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 10, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Emma Marris

Regular readers of this blog will remember a post about a cool palaeontology finding: more than 1,000 dinosaur footprints preserved on a three-quarter acre site in the US Southwest. We also mentioned that there was a whiff of doubt about the so-called "dinosaur dance floor". One scientist thought that the features could be geologically-formed potholes rather than the lasting impressions of a sauropod samba.

A week after the find was publicized, on October 30th, four curious palaeontologists hiked to the site and, well, they weren't impressed. “There simply are no tracks or real track-like features at this site,” said Brent Breithaupt, director and curator of the University of Wyoming’s Geological Museum. So maybe they were potholes after all.

The original team has graciously offered to team up with the doubters to further examine the site.

University of Utah press release.

Image: footprint or pothole? Winston Seiler / University of Utah

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 10, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Heidi Ledford

A 16-year-old frozen mouse carcass made headlines yesterday when scientists announced the rodent was the first frozen animal to be cloned. In a paper published online by PNAS, Teruhiko Wakayama of RIKEN in Yokohama, Japan, and his colleagues report that they were able to produce healthy clones from the rodent’s frozen brain cells.

Frozen cells have been cloned before but those cells were specially treated with chemicals that helped protect them from the damaging effects of freezing. Wakayama’s paper is the first to successfully clone a frozen animal that was, from what I can tell, pretty much just placed in a paper box and plunked straight into a –20ºC freezer in the early 1990’s.

The authors are excited about the possibility of using the technology to resurrect the woolly mammoth from carcasses frozen in Arctic tundra, but acknowledge the possible technological leap between using a 16-year-old and a 40,000-year-old frozen body. (I won’t pretend to understand the obsession with the woolly mammoth, but have acknowledged that the obsession is very real ever since I learned there is a black market for woolly mammoth parts run, at least in part, by the Russian mafia.)

Continue reading "Clones of the dead: A mouse now, Ted Williams later?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 04, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s hard enough to convince children to eat their greens. How hard is it going to be when those greens are a horrific shade of purple? Well, you could tell them it might keep them healthy. (That always works with children doesn’t it?)

By putting genes from the snapdragon into tomatoes, scientists have managed to increase the amount of pigment anthocyanins in the fruit. Eating anthocyanins may protect against diseases and, as the researchers behind this ‘super tomato’ report in Nature Biotechnology, cancer-susceptible mice fed the purple fruit showed “a significant extension of life span”.

Cathie Martin, lead author on the new paper, says (press release):

This is one of the first examples of metabolic engineering that offers the potential to promote health through diet by reducing the impact of chronic disease. And certainly the first example of a GMO with a trait that really offers a potential benefit for all consumers. The next step will be to take the preclinical data forward to human studies with volunteers to see if we can promote health through dietary preventive medicine strategies.

In comments distributed by the Science Media Centre a number of people caution about extrapolating the results to humans. Paul Kroon, of the Institute of Food Research in Norwich, notes, “Although this is promising, it would be naive to assume that the same would necessarily occur in humans, but certainly there should be more research to investigate how these foods may be of benefit.”

News coverage
Scientists develop cancer fighting purple tomato – Reuters
Purple tomato 'may boost health' – BBC
Purple 'super tomato' could fight cancer – Marie Claire

Headline watch
Purple pizzas -- just what the doctor ordered – AFP

Image top: whole and cross-section of ripe wild-type and Del/Ros1N tomato fruit.
Image lower: tomatoes harvested at green (left), breaker (middle) and red (right) ripening stages. Upper row are wild; middle row is Del/Ros1C type; lower row is Del/Ros1N type.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 27, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager

A 190 million-year-old skull could explain when carnivorous dinosaurs moved toward loving their greens. The skull shows that a tiny veggie-dining beast must have eaten some meat too.

“It’s likely that all dinosaurs evolved from carnivorous ancestors,” says Laura Porro, a post-doctoral student at the University of Chicago (press release). “Since heterodontosaurs are among the earliest dinosaurs adapted to eating plants, they may represent a transition phase between meat-eating ancestors and more sophisticated, fully-herbivorous descendents.”

The 4.5 centimetre-long skull belonged to a young Heterodontosaurus and is the world’s second smallest known dinosaur skull. “The skull of a baby dinosaur called Mussasaurus, or mouse lizard, from Argentina is smaller, at only 3 centimetres, [and is] probably the world’s smallest complete dinosaur skull,” Porro told Discovery News.

But even though this new toothy little thing doesn’t take the cake for being the smallest, it could give palaeontologists clues as to how and when dinosaurs, including Heterodontosauri, made the switch from dining on flesh to devouring plants. The creature’s tooth structure –worn, molar-like grinding teeth in the back and fang-like canines at the front – hints that the juvenile and his cousins were “in the midst of that transition”, says Porro, who helped described the new skull in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Continue reading "Tiny dino loved veggies—and meat too" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 24, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager

Meet Mr Green Genes, the latest addition to the glowing animal menagerie.

Mr Green Genes is the first fluorescent cat created in the United States. Under normal circumstances the feline appears orange, but under UV light, his eyes, gums and tongue glow lime green—the outcome of a genetic experiment done at the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species.

Researchers made Mr Green Genes glow green so they could learn whether they could make a transgenic cat, Betsy Dresser, the center’s director, told Newhouse News Service. The gene, inserted into to the cloned kitty’s DNA earlier this year, has no consequence for the feline’s health.

In fact, this green gene and its discovery grabbed the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for three lucky scientists earlier this month. (Listen to an interview with one of the winners, Martin Chalfie here).

“We wanted to know for sure that we could insert this gene into a cell and have it multiply,” Dresser told the MSNBC TODAY show’s Amy Robach. No glow, means a no go for the genes. But, because Mr Green Genes glows, the scientists know they nailed the insertion technique, a success that brings them one step closer to being able to insert healthy genes into humans and take the diseased ones out, Dresser noted.

And while the cat’s legacy may transform the medical world in a few years, Mr Green Genes could also leave his mark among his fellow felines in the coming months. “We’ll breed him and we’ll see if his kids glow, too,” Dresser said.

For more amazing green glowing critters, including glowing green mice, take a look here.

Image: by Anahid Pahhlawanian

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on October 24, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You know something is strange when even a peer reviewed journal calls it ‘bizarre’. Nature presents: Epidexipteryx hui. The strangest fossil seen on the Great Beyond in a while is detailed in a paper in this week’s issue.

Its most obvious intriguing feature is the two prominent pairs of tail feathers, which could have been used in mating displays.

“It shows that feathers were likely being used for ornamentation for many millions of years before they were modified for flight,” says Angela Milner, an expert at London’s Natural History Museum who was not involved in the research (BBC). “It provides fascinating evidence of evolutionary experiments with feathers that were going on before small dinosaurs finally took to the air and became birds.”

Discovered in China by researchers led by Fucheng Zhang, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the animal is probably between 152 and 168 million years old. This would make it slightly older than the earliest known bird Archaeopteryx.

“This is very exciting indeed, since it gives us a window into a stage of avialan history just preceding the appearance of the classic ‘first bird’,” says Zhang (National Geographic). Fellow paper author Zhonghe Zhou, adds, “Therefore, it could provide a lot of information about the transition process from dinos to birds” (Fox News).

The name comes from the Greek for ‘display’ and ‘feather’ (‘Epidexi’ and ‘pteryx’) and the late palaeontologist Yaoming Hu. Hu was an expert in Mesozoic mammals who died in April, says AFP.

Headline watch
Shake a tail-feather: Scientists reveal the pigeon-sized dinosaur that is birds' earliest ancestor – Daily Mail
Shake Your Jurassic Tail Feather – The Loom

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 23, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Emma Marris

More than 1,000 dinosaur tracks have been found on a ¾ acre site on the Arizona-Utah border (University of Utah press release, AP story, BBC story).

The spot has been dubbed a "dinosaur dance floor" by media-savvy geologists, conjuring up visions of prehistoric partying sure to appeal to the 6-year-old in all of us. In the Palaios article on the find, Marjorie Chan and Winston Seiler of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City are a little more subdued, calling the area "A Wet Interdune Dinosaur Trampled Surface".

The exact species that left the tracks 190 million years ago are not identified, but there were at least four. Also preserved are rare tail-drag marks.

At least, they may be tail-drag marks and tracks. The press release notes that "One anonymous reviewer of the Palaios study still believes the holes are erosion features." Naturally, the researchers disagree, noting among other things that the tracks overlap and that they come in four different shapes.

The area is remote and arid, and was very dry even in the days of the dinos. The researchers say it is likely that it was a watering hole in the desert. So perhaps a better title for this post would have been "Midnight at the Oasis". But with Halloween just around the corner, who can resist Bobby 'Boris' Pickett & The Crypt-Kickers?

More images here.

Image: geologist Winston Seiler on the ‘trample surface’ / Roger Seiler

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 21, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Please welcome the world’s longest insect. Measuring a horrifying 56.7cm (including legs) this stick insect has just been unveiled by the Natural History Museum in London and was described in the scientific literature for the first time this week.

In a paper in the journal Zootaxa, researchers Frank Hennemann and Oskar Conle propose a revision of the classification of oriental stick insects and along the way get around to describing seven new species (paper abstract pdf).

The star of this show is the record-breaking Chan’s megastick (Phobaeticus chani). It was given to Malaysian entomologist Datuk Chan Chew Lun by a local man and then shown to UK scientist Philip Bragg, who recognized it as a new species. Chan then donated one of the three known specimens to the museum.

“We’ve known about both of the previous record holders for over a hundred years, so it is extraordinary that an even bigger species has only just been discovered,” says George Beccaloni, stick-insect expert at the NHM (press release).

More photos and links to other media reports below the fold.

Continue reading "Picture post: longest insect is the stuff of nightmares" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 17, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

A fossil of the strange Tiktaalik fish has been giving up more of its secrets this week.

In a paper in Nature Jason Downs of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and his colleagues report on the head structure of Tiktaalik roseae, dubbed the ‘fishapod’ due to its position between fish and land-dwelling creatures. They show that it had developed features to allow it to breathe air and move on land, features such as a neck to allow head movements when the body is not as free to move as it would be in open water.

National Geographic notes that the features associated with the ‘neck’ suggest the animal wasn’t very good a pumping water into its body. This doesn’t mean it couldn’t breathe through its gills, but it suggests it maybe wasn’t spending lots of time underwater.

“It’s not to say that Tiktaalik itself is a terrestrial animal,” Downs told Reuters. “It spent most of its time in water, for sure. So what it’s really demonstrating is that many of these changes that are occurring and things that we once associated with terrestrial life are turning out, in fact, to be adaptations for life in shallow water settings that Tiktaalik might had found himself in.”

“We used to think of this transition of the neck and skull as a rapid event. largely because we lacked information about the intermediate animals. Tiktaalik neatly fills this morphological gap. It lets us see many of the individual steps and resolve the relative timing of this complex transition,” says paper author Neil Shubin, of the University of Chicago and Field Museum (press release).

Image: A model of Tiktaalik roseae / Model by Tyler Keillor, Photo by Beth Rooney

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 16, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This remarkable fossil shows an extremely rare example of fossilised collective behaviour, with shrimp-like beasties joined in a chain.

Although there are no modern analogues for this behaviour Derek Siveter of the University of Oxford thinks it might be some kind of migration.

“The spiny lobster is one example of this sort of migratory behaviour amongst modern arthropods,” he says (press release). “These lobsters join together in a kind of ‘train’ with the antennae of one animal sometimes touching the tail of the animal in front. However, the animals represented by the Chinese fossils are much more closely interlocked – they formed ‘chains’ rather than ‘trains’.”

The chains could also feasibly be some phase in the reproductive process or a peculiar life cycle stage. Or maybe they’re just having a conga line party.

“It’s still a bit of a mystery and there doesn’t seem to be a direct comparison with any living animal,” says Siveter (The Times).

The fossil was found in China and a paper detailing the results are published this week in Science by researchers from Oxford, Leicester and Yunnan.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 10, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Colourful biologist Marc van Roosmalen is generating more headlines this week after he announced plans to name a monkey after the wonderful world of blogs.

No longer will the term ‘blog monkey’ be something my editors can hurl at me in the morning when they want coffee. Instead it will belong to Lagothrix blogii, if van Roosmalen gets his way.

Van Roosmalen hit the news in a big way last year when he was imprisoned by the Brazilian government for taking four monkeys from the rainforest without the correct permits (see this Nature story from August 2007). He was later released on appeal and since found the time to claim the discovery of a giant peccary (see this blog from November 2007). He says there have been two attempts on his life since then.

Now the blog monkey project has started up in the hope of raising enough money to get him back to work. Some of van Roosmalen’s methods of naming species have been slightly outside regular scientific practice, so it’s not clear whether Lagothrix blogii would be accepted by the world at large as the name of what he says is a new species of woolly monkey.

The campaign website notes:

The monkey is found in a part of the Rio Aripuanã region and is just one of many species in that location waiting to be discovered or recognized by science, so it is easy to see why we need to get Marc van Roosmalen back out there discovering and describing new species.

We know that we are trying to raise a lot of money but we think, and hopefully you do to, that this is a great way to show the importance of blogs and to get a lasting evidence of this – a monkey species named after the blogosphere.

Debate on the relative merits of the project is going on over at Pharyngula.

Image: the potential Lagothrix blogii

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 25, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
Think dinosaur and the great T-Rex or towering Triceratops probably comes to mind. But size is not everything. Albertonykus borealis, a newly discovered dinosaur that roamed Alberta, Canada about 70 million years ago was the size of a chick, and is believed to be the smallest dinosaur to have lived in North America (press release).

Having jaws shaped like needlenose pliers, pick-like claws and bird feet, A. borealis was “really bizarre” and looked like it was a “creation of Dr. Seuss,” Nicholas Longrich, a paleontology research associate at the University of Calgary, told the Calgary Herald. The creature looks like different animals stitched together, he said in the article.

The tiny dino’s bones were unearthed in 2002 when paleontologist Philip Currie of the University of Alberta was digging at Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park, which is about 175 kilometres northeast of Calgary. But, the fossils were not what Currie was looking for at the time and were ultimately put in a drawer at the Royal Tyrrell Museum. Three years later, Longrich was going through the museum’s drawers, saw an interesting pick-like claw bone and determined it most likely belonged to a new type of dinosaur.

Continue reading "Dino of the day: teeny-tiny-osaurs" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 25, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It seems we owe more to fish than we thought. As well as providing us with a source of sushi they may well have given us our fingers.

Previously it was suggested that land based tetrapods were the first animals to have fingers. Now a paper published in Nature shows that rough fingers were present in the fossil fish Panderichthys.

“This was the key piece of the puzzle that confirms that rudimentary fingers were already present in ancestors of tetrapods,” says study author Catherine Boisvert, of Uppsala University (press release).

Using CT scanning, Boisvert shows that a 380 million year old Panderichthys fossil has digit-like elements on the end of its right hand fin. This enabled the researchers to solve a tricky problem: most fossils of this species come from one quarry in Latvia where the clay is pretty much the same colour as the fish (AFP).

“With a nice big bone, that is not a problem,” study co-author Per Ahlberg told AFP. “But if you are interested in tiny, fragile bones at the outer end of the fin skeleton, it is nearly impossible to see what is going on.” Ahlberg has previously featured on the Great Beyond in “Fantastic four-legged-fish fossils”.

Those non-British readers confused by our country’s near-universal usage of the term ‘fish finger’ in headlines should read this article in the Financial Times. Then you will be fully up to speed with an item that fully confirms the bad opinion our continental cousins have of our cuisine.

Headline watch
Digital evolution: early fish had primitive fingers, says study – AFP
Fish Gave Us the Finger – Scientific American
Scientists discover why we all have fish fingers – Daily Mail

Image: reconstruction of Panderichthys fin endoskeleton / C. Boisvert and P. Ahlberg

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 23, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Amber Dance [with apologies for the lateness of posting– Ed.]

If you are easily startled by disturbing images or sudden noises, you might be a conservative. If you don’t react strongly to such stimuli, you might be a liberal.

So says a paper published in Science. John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and colleagues tested 46 Nebraskans with strong political beliefs on their fear response.

The researchers selected participants that had strong political leanings, in either direction, based on a survey. They considered issues such as gun control, the death penalty and immigration, but not economic matters. The authors classified their subjects in terms of how much they wanted to “protect the existing social structure” – generally something conservatives strive for, while liberals are more amenable to change.

In one experiment, participants viewed a series of images, three of which were threatening: a giant spider on a person’s face, a person with a bloody face, and a maggot-filled wound. The scientists measured the skin conductance, a fear indicator, when subjects viewed the nasty pictures, and found it went up in the conservatives.

Continue reading "The physiology of personal politics" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 22, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Plants seem to dose themselves with a chemical similar to aspirin when they get stressed. They don’t get stressed by migraines or stubbing their toes but drought, pathogens or extreme temperatures have them reaching for their own version of the pill bottle.

“Unlike humans, who are advised to take aspirin as a fever suppressant, plants have the ability to produce their own mix of aspirin-like chemicals, triggering the formation of proteins that boost their biochemical defences and reduce injury,” says Thomas Karl, a researcher at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (press release).

Karl says that although it has previously been known that plants in labs can produce methyl salicylate, a type of acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin), it hasn’t been seen in the wild before. But Karl reports in Biogeosciences that instruments set up to measure plant emissions of other volatile organic compounds also picked up methyl salicylate.

The study could also add weight to suggestions that methyl salicylate is used by plants to signal each other about threats.

“These findings show tangible proof that plant-to-plant communication occurs on the ecosystem level. It appears that plants have the ability to communicate through the atmosphere,” says NCAR scientist Alex Guenther, a co-author of the study.

They’re talking now, soon they’ll be getting organised and then we’re in real trouble.

News coverage

Plants make their own painkillers - MSNBC
Stressed plants produce an aspirin-like chemical – AP
Stressed plants release aspirin-like chemical – Reuters

Image: One of NCAR’s plant emission measuring towers / Carlye Calvin, ©UCAR

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 19, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Can a dinosaur get lucky through mass extinction? Apparently the answer is yes, at least according to a paper published in Science.

In this paper Stephen Brusatte, of the American Museum of Natural History, and colleagues report that the dinos were lucky. Specifically, they found that the reason dinosaurs prospered at the expense of crurotarsan archosaurs (crocodiles’ great-to-the-power-n ancestors) was probably luck.

“If we were standing in the Late Triassic, 210 million years ago or so, and had to bet on which group would eventually dominate ecosystems, all reasonable gamblers would go with the crurotarsans,” says Brusatte (press release from Bristol University, where much of the work was done).

Continue reading "Dinos were super-lucky-o-sauruses" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 12, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)