Ecology & Zoology

Phenotype For Hybrid Necrosis Points To Fertility Barrier In Thale Cress

Plant biologists at the Max Planck Institute of Developmental Biology and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have discovered that an autoimmune response, triggered by a small number of genes, can be a barrier to producing a viable offspring. S ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 5 2007 - 10:21am

Why Bears Rub Trees- Communication And Peacekeeping

Bears don't rub trees because their backs are itchy. Dr Owen Nevin of the University of Cumbria states that adult male grizzly bears use so-called “rub trees” as a way to communicate with each other while looking for breeding females, and that this be ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 4 2007 - 6:03pm

How Violence Shaped Evolution

The fossil record seems to indicate that the diversity of marine creatures increased and decreased over hundreds of millions of years in step with predator-prey encounters, Virginia Tech geoscientists report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sc ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 11 2007 - 10:18am

Arctic Ocean Ecosystem Analysis Shows Thinner Ice

The sea-ice is getting thinner. Large areas of the Arctic sea-ice are only one metre thick this year, equating to an approximate 50 percent thinning as compared to the year 2001. These are the initial results from the latest Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Po ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 13 2007 - 11:55am

Ornithologists Count Birds To Show Global Warming

If you've ever watched birds at a feeder, you've seen changes in how many birds feed from season to seasons and year to year. Do some of the long-term shifts reflect changes in the environment and climate? To find out, the Cornell Lab of Ornithol ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 17 2007 - 1:19pm

Solved: Where Sea Turtles Go After Leaving The Nest

Biologists have found a major clue in a 50-year-old mystery about what happens to green sea turtles after they crawl out of their sandy nests and vanish into the surf, only to reappear several years later relatively close to shore. Three University of Flor ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 19 2007 - 10:01am

Australian Skinks And Why Some Species Are More Diverse Than Others

A new study of finger-sized Australian lizards sheds light on one of the most striking yet largely unexplained patterns in nature: Why is it that some groups of animals have evolved into hundreds, even thousands of species, while other groups include only ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 19 2007 - 8:01pm

Global Warming Puzzle: Amazon Rainforest Showed Better Growth During Drought

Accepted global climate models had predicted the Amazon forest would begin to "brown down" after just a month of drought and eventually collapse as the drought progressed. Instead, drought-stricken regions of the Amazon forest grew particularly v ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 21 2007 - 2:48pm

Proof: Vitamin C Essential For Plant Growth

Scientists have proved for the first time that vitamin C is essential for plant growth. Vitamin C is already known to be an antioxidant, which helps plants deal with stresses from drought to ozone and UV radiation, but until now it was not known that plant ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 24 2007 - 2:01am

Social Networking- For Plants

Recent research from Vidi researcher Josef Stuefer at the Radboud University Nijmegen reveals that plants have their own chat systems that they can use to warn each other. Therefore plants are not boring and passive organisms that just stand there waiting ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 25 2007 - 12:25pm