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POPSWorm-like Marine Animal Providing Fresh Clues About Human Evolution The human genome has only about 25 percent more genes than the amphioxus genome, according to Holland. During evolution, humans have duplicated genes for different functions. Such duplication has given humans and other vertebrates a much larger "toolkit" for making various structures that are absent in amphioxus, including cells for pigment and collagen type II-based cartilage, for example.
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POPSNew Research On Octopuses Sheds Light On Memory It is not completely understood how these two systems are interconnected, if at all. However, the organization in the octopus demonstrates a sophistication that was not described yet in other animals. In the octopus, the short-term and long-term systems are working in parallel, but not independently. This is so because the long-term memory area -- in addition to its capacity to store long-term memories -- also regulates the rate at which the short-term memory system acquires short-term memories. This regulatory mechanism is probably useful in cases where faster learning is significant for the octopus' survival in emergency or risky situations.
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POPSOrigins of the brain - new study
"Although many studies have looked at the number of neurons, none has looked at the molecular composition of neuron connections. We found dramatic differences in the numbers of proteins in the neuron connections between different species". "We studied around 600 proteins that are found in mammalian synapses and were surprised to find that only 50 percent of these are also found in invertebrate synapses, and about 25 percent are in single-cell animals, which obviously don't have a brain." Most important for understanding of human thought, they found the expansion in proteins that occurred in vertebrates provided a pool of proteins that were used for making different parts of the brain into the specialised regions such as cortex, cerebellum and spinal cord. Since the evolution of molecularly complex, 'big' synapses occurred before the emergence of large brains, it may be that these molecular evolutionary events were necessary to allow evolution of big brains found in humans, pri
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POPSBdelloids can take advantage of the entire environmental metagenome Nearly all other multicellular animals have strong safeguards against foreign DNA, but bdelloids' seeming embrace of genetic detritus is in keeping with their general quirkiness: Shunning sex and entirely lacking males, the ubiquitous creatures are also extraordinarily resistant to radiation, as Meselson and Gladyshev demonstrated earlier this year in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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POPSSea cucumber makes hard plastic go soft and back again. It's amazing the number of discoveries we have made which have been described as great innovations, when nature has found a quicker and easier way long before us. Our destruction of the environment is destroying many of these examples before we find them. Nature has a remarkable way of working around problems, as the 'law of survival remains fundamental, and it has had hundreds of millions of years of field tests.
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POPSFox Guards Henhouse The Legislature has again become invertebrate. These worms have bowed to politics over principle by allowing the AG to be the arbiter of privacy in this nation. Check and balances? Forget them. Oversight? Too much trouble. Stand up to the President/King? Too risky. As we bleat our way forward we have only ourselves to blame for keeping our mouths shut.
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POPSGonzo Gone From the article: "If Americans didn't have the attention span of a newt, if the media cared as much about the health of democracy as the health of the bottom line, if Democrats had the courage of their convictions, the last chapter of the Alberto Gonzales story will not have been written the day he resigned. If, if, if... I know: If Gonzales had had integrity, he wouldn't have been an invertebrate."
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