If there was a 'Just So' story for how the zebra got its stripes, I'm sure that Rudyard Kipling would have come up with an amusing and entertaining camouflage explanation. But would he have come up with the explanation that ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 9, 2012
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Shark skin has long been known to improve the fish's swimming performance by reducing drag, but now George Lauder and Johannes Oeffner from Harvard University show that in addition, the skin generates thrust, giving the fish ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 9, 2012
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Researchers have learned how to improve the performance of sensors that use tiny vibrating microcantilevers to detect chemical and biological agents for applications from national security to food processing.
Engineering
Feb 7, 2012
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An article in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Integrated Pest Management (JIPM) refutes claims by Greenpeace Germany that the western bean cutworm (WBC), Striacosta albicosta (Smith), is "a new plant pest" that was ...
Ecology
Jan 6, 2012
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It is well known that large mammals living in temperate climates lower their metabolism in winter. But does this represent a mechanism for coping with less food or is it merely a consequence of having less to eat? For the ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 16, 2011
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Researchers at the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) have, for the very first time, developed a computational tool that comes with a guarantee on its reliability when reconstructing the DNA sequence of organisms, thus enabling ...
Biotechnology
Dec 5, 2011
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A honey bee becomes a royal queen or a common worker as a result of the food she receives as a larva. While it has been well established that royal jelly is the diet that makes bees queens, the molecular path from food to ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 10, 2011
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Many meat-eating animals have unique ways of hunting down a meal using their senses. To find a tasty treat, bats use echolocation, snakes rely on infrared vision, and owls take advantage of the concave feathers ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 1, 2011
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A new study has shown that racehorses are extremely sensitive to changes in daily light and, contrary to humans, can adapt very quickly to sudden shifts in the 24-hour light-dark cycle, such as those resulting from a transmeridian ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 18, 2011
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The carbon dioxide we exhale and the odors our skins emanate serve as crucial cues to female mosquitoes on the hunt for human hosts to bite and spread diseases such as malaria, dengue and yellow fever.
Cell & Microbiology
Sep 30, 2011
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