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POPSScientists find the secret to swatting flies Handily, the research suggests an optimal method for successfully swatting a fly. "It is best not to swat at the fly's starting position, but rather to aim a bit forward of that to anticipate where the fly is going to jump when it first sees your swatter,"
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POPSSex, lies and some existential questions.. :-) So many orchids treat their pollinators so nastily, with false promises of food and sex or the occasional dunking of insect visitors into bucket-shaped petals full of liquid, that naturalists have puzzled over the relationship for more than a century. Darwin was so consumed by the odd interactions that after “The Origin of Species,” his next book was an entire volume on the subject, “The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects.”
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POPSA man made "plague" to treat a plague It's a new concept, that looks very promising. pre treating the disease, by infecting the carriers, mosquitos, with a virus which is harmless for humans. Very interesting!
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POPSResearchers Can Swat Flies "It is best not to swat at the fly's starting position," Dickinson said. Instead, aim for the escape route. And who didn't need to know that??? I'm curious, does anyone think there was a "need" to research on why it's so hard to swat a fly ?
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POPSSpider webs Ok, I'm a huge a arachnophob, but I can't say that these aren't beautiful. The "mass" or comunal webs really freak me out though. Those two pics I believe are the 2 creepiest pics I've ever seen.
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POPSAnimal senses humans don't have You might think you're smart, but none of your senses rival the keenest abilities in the animal world. Animals see in the dark, sniff prey miles away, and detect electrical output from muscle twitches in hidden meals. Read on, so you don't become one of those meals.<<
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POPSHuman Obesity Genes Revealed Based On Fly Experiments As De Luca reports, "We found one variant to be associated with weight and lean mass in both ethnic groups. This variant was also associated with height, total fat mass and HDL-cholesterol, but only in European American women. A different variant was associated with triglyceride levels and HDL-cholesterol in African American women." The use of flies in a study of human obesity may seem strange, but according to De Luca "Insects store fat like mammals do, as lipid droplets accumulated in the fat body, the functional equivalent of both mammalian liver and white adipose tissue". She adds that, "Drosophila share many components of fat biosynthesis, degradation and regulation with humans, including many of those implicated in diabetes and obesity".
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POPSFranken-food or End of Hunger? There is a lot of hysteria concerning genetically altered food. Uninformed boobs like Bush view it as something pre-apocalyptic. Others see it as a panacea. Like most endeavors I suspect the answer lies somewhere in between.
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POPSDino diversity earlier than first thought Maybe there is the idea that species including the dinosaurs were trying to deal with conditions brought about by the meteor, so many adaptations arose, but nature loves nothing more than competition, even when times are good.
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POPSDinosaurs Diversified Over Time, not Suddenly During this epoch of riotous biodiversity, flowering plants, social insects, butterflies, modern groups of lizards, mammals, and possibly birds, too, all emerged. Some experts have suggested that dinosaurs were also part of the show, as so many weird fossils, such as duckbilled hadrosaurs, horned ceratopsians, pachycephalosaurs and other wonders, date from this time. But a new study, published on Wednesday in a British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, says that dinosaurs were less than a sideshow in the DNA spectacular. Researchers led by Graeme Lloyd of the University of Bristol, western England, devised a "supertree" of dinosaur evolution, patiently analyzing how more than 450 species -- about 70 percent of the known finds -- developed.
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POPSoldest living things on earth Some of the oldest living things on earth are Bristlecone pine trees, some of which can be found in the White Mountains of California. Many of them are over four thousand years old. Many of the trees living today were seedlings when the pyramids were being constructed, and mature trees in the time of Christ. These trees are ancient! Go 2 source 4 more info.
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