Closely related species of Pairie dog don’t live together (Photo credit Imperial College) Ever wondered why family feuds result in fighting relatives keeping their distance … often for a very long time? Well, reseachers at Imperial College, UK have observed that steering clear of your rels may have evolutionary beginnings. Mammals cannot share their habitat with closely related species because the need for the same kind of food and shelter would lead them to compete to the death. This idea that closely related species would be unlikely to be found together because they compete ferociously was first put forward by Charles Darwin …read more

(Photo credit: www.marinebio.org) 
At the Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Bonn nearly 200 countries agreed on measures to protect the world’s most threatened wildlife.  They pledged:
1. To set up a deep-sea nature reserve and increase by tens of millions of hectares the area of land protected (the resulting protected area would be twice the size of Germany).
2. To ban experiments to boost plankton growth to reverse climate change, because of the potential risks to other animals.
3. To set global standards for developing biofuels, a renewable energy that has been blamed for deforestation.
But environmentalists said the progress achieved at the conference was still failing …read more

(Photo credit: British Museum, crystal skull) 
Without giving too much of the plot away, the focus of the latest ‘Indiana’ movie is about crystal skulls thought to have been produced by early American civilizations.
But experts say examples held at the British Museum in London and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC are anything but genuine.  Their results show the skulls were made using tools not available to the ancient Aztecs or Mayans and were more than likely to have been produced in the 1960s.
Researchers say the work, which is published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, should end decades of speculation over …read more

 (Tasmanian Tiger – photo credit www.bbc.co.uk/news)
Using transgenic mice, Australian and American researchers have shown that they can “resurrect” a snippet of DNA from the genome of an extinct animal — the Tasmanian tiger — and test its biological function in a living animal.   The last Tasmanian Tiger died in an Australian zoo in 1936 having been hunted to extinction.
Dr Andrew Pask, of the Department of Zoology at Melbourne University, who led the research, said it was the first time that DNA from an extinct species had been used to carry out a function in a living organism.
“As more and more …read more

Different types of skin cancer
(Photo credit: http://melanoma.blogsome.com/category/skin-image-processing)
University of Minnesota researchers looking to answer the question ‘why does ultraviolet light induce skin cancer?’ believe they have found how sun-induced skin cancer starts.  They found the cancer starts in receptor molecules or molecular “hooks” on the outer surface of cells that also pull cannabinoid compounds found in marijuana out of the bloodstream.
These receptor molecules are protein structures that are components of a cell’s outer membrane. They act like receiving docks and catch specific compounds from the blood and enable the cells to engulf or  interact with the compounds.
The researchers found that two receptors for cannabinoids also responded …read more

 
KQED Public Broadcasting in San Francisco recently did a radio story about the UC San Francisco Canine Behavioral Genetics Project run in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania. The aims of the project are:
1. To explore the relationship between genes and behavior, both normal and abnormal, in domestic dogs.
2. To assess the amount and nature of genetic diversity in domestic dogs, both within and between breeds. 
Melanie Chang of the CBG project
Anyone wishing to send in their dog’s DNA can visit the site:
http://www.k9behavioralgenetics.com/ 
Dog DNA samples waiting to be processed at the CBG project 
However, it is often said dogs and their owners resemble each other. …read more

(Picture courtesy of BBC News)
Scientists have discovered the oldest human remains in western Europe.
A jawbone and teeth discovered at the famous Atapuerca site in northern Spain have been dated between 1.1 and 1.2 million years old.
Scientists also found stone tools and animal bones with tell-tale cut marks from butchering by humans.
Its small size suggests it could have belonged to a female.
The finds provide further evidence for the great antiquity of human occupation on the continent, the researchers write in the journal Nature.
Elaine Warburton  www.geneticsandhealth.com

‘Clover structure’ of Transfer RNA 
Transfer RNA (tRNA) is ancient. It is the most direct intermediary between genes and proteins. Like many other RNAs (ribonucleic acids), tRNA aids in translating genes into the chains of amino acids that make up proteins. The fact that tRNA is so central to the task of building proteins probably means that it has been around for a long time.
Professor Gustavo Caetano-Anollés and Feng-Jie Sung of Univeristy of Illinois-Urbana Champaigne had a hunch that understanding the structural properties of tRNA would shed light on how organisms and viruses evolved.
All tRNAs assemble themselves into a shape that, if …read more

 
(The Smiling Faces of Boddhastavas, Cambodia)
Ever the eternal optimist, here’s a piece of research which I can really relate to … Psychologists at the University of Edinburgh working with researchers at Queensland Institute for Medical Research in Australia found that happiness is partly determined by personality traits and that both personality and happiness are largely hereditary.
Rating personalities with the ‘Five factor model’ the researchers found that people who do not excessively worry, and who are sociable and conscientious tend to be happier. The findings suggest that those lucky enough to have the right inherited personality mix have an ‘affective reserve’ of happiness which can …read more

(Photo credit: Flu viruses among cilia – National Geographic magazine http://www.nationalgeographic.com/)
US scientists have discovered a possible reason why the flu virus is seasonal and tends to infect people mostly in the winter. It has a jacket that melts in the summer causing the virus to die off, and stays hard in the winter, until it enters a host where it melts and gets to work. The discovery could lead to new ways to prevent and treat the flu.
Neuroscientist Joshua Zimmerberg and colleagues, based at the Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Biophysics (LCMB) in the National Institute of Child Health and …read more