Scientific American - Biology

Scientific American recommends 3 books about the moon

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 07:00:00 EST

The books highlighted below commemorate the 40th anniversary this month of the first manned landing on the moon.

Painting Apollo: First Artist on Another World [More]

Fewer calories = longer life? A new primate study says, yes

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:55:00 EST

Long a subject of debate--and experiments with everything from yeast to mice--the question of whether a lower calorie diet increases life span while decreasing disease has a new smorgasbord of evidence. [More]

If Swine Flu Weren't Enough, Now There's Swine Ebola

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:30:00 EST

Don't worry, it can't hurt you--yet. [More]

Drugmakers Abandon Nature's Pharmacy

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:00:00 EST

In the 1992 film Medicine Man, actor Sean Connery stars as a grizzled scientist who discovers a cure for cancer in the Amazon and then struggles to replicate his findings as bulldozers destroy the very forests that harbor it. "What don't you understand?" he wails. "I found the cure for the...plague of the 20th century, and now I've lost it!" [More]

Popularity is In Your Genes

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:00:00 EST

We take it for granted that certain aspects of our social behavior--whether we chat easily with strangers at a party, for instance, or prefer to be a wallflower--are influenced by genetics. But now researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University have shown that genes have a much broader sway, affecting the kinds of social networks people form and the positions they occupy in them.

James Fowler, a political scientist at U.C.S.D., and his colleagues studied the social networks of 1,110 adolescent fraternal and identical twins. They found that three aspects of the twins’ social networks appeared to be shaped by genetics. How many times each teen was named by others as a friend and how likely each youth’s friends were to know one another were both approximately 50 percent related to genetic factors. Whether a teen was located at the center of a network or toward the edge was about 30 percent genetic.

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Spotted owl recovery plan spotty, says new study

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:45:00 EST

The 2008 recovery plan for the northern spotted owl is not likely to help the iconic species recover. In fact, the plan could substantially increase threats to the bird, according to a new study in the journal Conservation Biology. [More]

U.S. Energy Corridors Could Disrupt Climate Change Research

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:00:00 EST

On Tuesday, fourteen conservation groups and a Colorado county sued the federal government, alleging that it violated environmental, property and energy laws in designating "energy corridors" along 6,000 miles (9,650 kilometers) of public land and wilderness areas in the U.S. West. [More]

Swans are dying by the dozen in Ireland, cause unknown

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:40:00 EST

Swans, ducks and fish have been dying in droves at a popular Irish wildlife sanctuary, reports ProMed Mail (which keeps tabs on mass animal deaths as a means to provide an alert for possible human health threats). Officials in Cork, where the sanctuary called the Lough--is located, have not announced a cause, but observers and experts are positing everything from a foreign virus to lead poisoning. [More]

Endangered Species Get Iced in Museum DNA Repository

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:20:00 EST

Deep below the dinosaur displays, a laboratory in the basement of a 19th-century building at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City houses the institute's newest collection: eight large, liquid nitrogen–cooled cryogenic vats. Called the Ambrose Monell Collection for Molecular and Microbial Research, the lab is home to thousands of frozen microscopic genetic samples. And the collection is about to receive some important new--and rare--specimens. [More]

The Good News: A New Monkey Is Discovered; The Bad News: It Is Already at Risk

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:55:00 EST

A new monkey is swinging through the Amazon rainforests--at least it's new to scientists. Unfortunately, the future of this mini monkey, weighing in at just 7.5 ounces (213 grams) and nine inches (23 centimeters) tall, is already threatened by human development. [More]

Rare Siberian tigers face potential genetic bottleneck

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:35:00 EST

It's been a long century for the Amur, or Siberian, tiger (Panthera tigris altaica), the largest of the six remaining tiger subspecies. Once hunted nearly to extinction, just 50 tigers remained when Russia protected the species in 1947. Despite that protection, illegal poaching soon dropped that number to as few as 20. But enforcement and careful conservation over the ensuring decades have done wonders, and today the worldwide Amur tiger population stands at more than 900--421 in captivity and an estimated 500 in the wild. [More]

Are Parasites to Thank for Sex?

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:26:08 EST

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

Sex might seem like one of those little gifts from evolution. But it’s pretty inefficient from an evolutionary perspective. It’d be much easier to reproduce if you could do away with finding the right member of the opposite sex to help you create the next generation. So why did evolution come up with sex?

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Do Parents Matter?

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:00:00 EST

Editors' note, 7/8/09: This article was adapted for Scientific American Mind magazine from the Mind Matters article, "Do Parents Matter?", which was published online at ScientificAmerican.com on April 9, 2009.

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Did China's Nuclear Tests Kill Thousands and Doom Future Generations?

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 08:00:00 EST

Enver Tohti remembers the week that it rained dust. That summer of 1973 he was in elementary school in Xinjiang Province, China’s westernmost region, which is inhabited mostly by Uygurs, one of the country’s minority ethnic groups. “There were three days that earth fell from the sky, without wind or any sort of storm. The sky was deadly silent--no sun, no moon,” he recalls. When the kids asked what was happening, the teacher told them that there was a storm on Saturn (its Chinese name translates into “soil planet”). Tohti believed her. It was only years later that he realized it was radioactive dust raised by the test detonation of a nuclear bomb within the province.

Three decades on, Tohti, now a medical doctor, is launching an investigation into the toll still being taken--and one that the Chinese government steadfastly refuses to acknowledge. A few hundred thousand people may have died as a result of radiation from at least 40 nuclear explosions carried out between 1964 and 1996 at the Lop Nur site in Xinjiang, which lies on the Silk Road. Almost 20 million people reside in Xinjiang, and Tohti believes that they offer unique insight into the long-term impact of radiation, including the relatively little studied genetic effects that may be handed down over generations. He is establishing the Lop Nur project at Sapporo Medical University in Japan with physicist Jun Takada to evaluate these consequences.

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France faces E.U. lawsuit for failing to protect endangered hamster

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:35:00 EST

How do you save an endangered species when there is no political will to save it? How about a lawsuit? [More]

Roses are blue--At least recently approved genetically engineered versions are

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:45:00 EST

In a popular Chinese folktale, a blue rose is the ticket to marry the princess. Naturally, her vying suitors struggle; a rose simply doesn’t grow that color. In the end, the princess marries the gardener’s son who offers a beautiful white rose--because it appears blue through a stained glass window. [More]

Fat mice missing a specific kind of "junk DNA" more likely to be diabetic

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:08:00 EST

A large portion of the human genome (approximately 98 percent) does not encode genes. Long thought to be "junk DNA," these portions, researchers continue to learn, can play a role in genetic activity and, subsequently, in health and sickness. According to researchers at the German Institute of Human Nutrition, one such junk fragment might actually prevent symptoms of type 2 diabetes in obese mammals. [More]

Could Animal Surveillance Have Seen Swine Flu Coming?

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:00:00 EST

Less than 24 hours after a commercial jet took a sudden detour into the Hudson River this past January, security camera video of the event from multiple vantage points began surfacing. In an age of ubiquitous surveillance, the public has come to assume that someone or something is always watching, ready to spot trouble as it is happening. Yet a novel strain of the influenza A (H1N1) virus jumped species and burst into the human population in March and April, and by late May health and agriculture officials were still trying to figure out where it came from.

The emergence of the new H1N1 flu strain has demonstrated the effectiveness of existing systems to watch for human flu outbreaks while also proving a long-standing theory that pigs could serve as mixing vessels for a pandemic virus. But it has also highlighted how disappointing progress has been in detecting where and how such viruses evolve in animals and in predicting their transmission to people--abilities that might have helped avert a pandemic or at least provide an early warning.

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Government-funded researchers can now study hundreds of embryonic stem cell lines

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:00:00 EST

This morning marks a rebirth of a U.S. stem cell research program, now that government-funded researchers can take advantage of many of the 700 stem cell lines that exist around the world. [More]

New dino species discovered in the land Down Under

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:35:00 EST

Paleontologists have dug up not one but three new dinosaur species in Australia, a continent that has turned up few large fossil finds. The mid-Cretaceous giants include two massive plant-eating titanosaurs--Witonotitan wattsi and Diamantinasaurus matildae--and a fearsome carnivorous theropod--Australovenator wintonesis--reported in a PLoS ONE study last week. [More]