Nice Comment

Comment by Chris on August 4, 2019 at 5:00am

Can Look at Bonobos vs. Chimpansies.

I'm looking at language and how it incites violence (for example).

Don't mean to over reach, but am finding language interesting.

Curious  why for example some won't call "The" Don a xenophobe.

break. Nonsense conversation.

Comment by Chris on August 4, 2019 at 4:34am

Greenland ice sheet melt.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/greenland-lost-11-billion-tons...

Why don't others see this stuff.

Comment by Doone on August 3, 2019 at 9:32pm

This Naprepa sp. caterpillar is found in Ecuador and has huge fake eyes on its body to scare off predators! (Photo: Andreas Kay)

Comment by Doone on August 3, 2019 at 9:13pm

Humans have turned many wild animals into cuddlier creatures. We’ve domesticated wolves into dogs, boars into barnyard pigs and mountain goats into livestock that do yoga. But in addition to helpful animals and adorable pets, humans may have also domesticated an altogether different creature: Homo sapiens.

The so-called self-domestication hypothesis, floated by Charles Darwin and formulated by 21st century scholars, is now popular among anthropologists. They see parallels between changes over the past 200,000 years of human evolution and those observed when wild animals became domesticates, creatures selectively bred to be docile and friendly.

According to proponents, as human societies grew in size and complexity, more cooperative, less combative individuals fared better. These behavioral traits are heritable to some extent and also linked with physical traits, such as stress hormone levels, testosterone during development and skull robustness. Tamer individuals more successfully passed on their genes, and so these traits prevailed in the human lineage. Over time, our species became domesticated.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2019/05/03/how-humans-domest...

Comment by Stephen on June 30, 2019 at 10:13am

Doone, I listen to Melvyn Bragg on the radio each week. He always has interesting people and subjects on his show.

Comment by Doone on June 30, 2019 at 9:19am

Birds and Dinosaurs

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b099v33p

Comment by Chris on March 28, 2019 at 5:21am

Might be of interest to some.

Colder Than Ice: Researchers Discover How Microbes Survive in Subfr...

Most microbial researchers grow their microbes in petri-dishes to study how they grow and how they respond to damaging conditions. But researchers in Louisiana State University’s Department of Biological Sciences are doing something almost unheard of: studying microbes under freezing conditions to understand how organisms could survive for hundreds of thousands of years in deep [...]

Most microbial researchers grow their microbes in petri-dishes to study how they grow and how they respond to damaging conditions. But researchers in Louisiana State University’s Department of Biological Sciences are doing something almost unheard of: studying microbes under freezing conditions to understand how organisms could survive for hundreds of thousands of years in deep Antarctic permafrost, or perhaps even buried in ice on Mars.

“I could take you down the hallway into a common room we have, full of freezers,” said Brent Christner, an associate professor in LSU’s Department of Biological Sciences and Antarctic microbe explorer extraordinaire, leaning excitedly over his desk as he shows me microscope images of cells encased in ice. “And in those freezers are cells and tissues. We put them there, because that is actually a way to preserve them.”

Christner’s lab keeps thousands of different strains of microbes stored at -80 degrees Celsius. These microbes, he explains, are actually quite happily revived if taken out of the freezer and placed in nutrient-rich media. “But what if those freezers could run for a million years?” Christner asked. “We’d actually expect a fraction of them to die off every year, because they are made up of molecules that, even if frozen, are subject to decay.”

Christner and colleagues at LSU, postdoctoral researcher Markus Dieser and Mary Lou Applewhite Professor of biology John Battista, recently had a paper on DNA repair mechanisms in frozen microbes accepted in the journal of Applied and Environmental Microbiology. To understand how microbes survive in frozen conditions, Christner and colleagues focused on DNA, the hereditary molecule that encodes the genetic instructions used in the development and function of living organisms from humans to microbes. Microbe DNA is typically millions of base pairs, or units, long, often arranged into a single circular structure that encodes thousands of genes.

More in the above link.

For fun a song link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YohsEI1PTSc

Comment by Chris on March 28, 2019 at 5:16am

Another commonly heald  understanding is that Intiuits are able to  maintain heat, not ontly because of their clothing, but also because  of adaptation that includes body and limb size.

Comment by Chris on March 28, 2019 at 2:39am

You might be interestd in  the following:

about Lunne Cox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Cox

Comment by Stephen on March 24, 2019 at 6:45pm

Molecular mechanism and history of non-sense to sense evolution of antifreeze glycoprotein gene in northern gadids

Significance
The diverse antifreeze proteins enabling the survival of different polar fishes in freezing seas offer unparalleled vistas into the breadth of genetic sources and mechanisms that produce crucial new functions. Although most new genes evolved from preexisting genic ancestors, some are deemed to have arisen from noncoding DNA. However, the pertinent mechanisms, functions, and selective forces remain uncertain. Our paper presents clear evidence that the antifreeze glycoprotein gene of the northern codfish originated from a noncoding region. We further describe the detailed mechanism of its evolutionary transformation into a full-fledged crucial life-saving gene. This paper is a concrete dissection of the process of a de novo gene birth that has conferred a vital adaptive function directly linked to natural selection.

Read more =  https://www.pnas.org/content/116/10/4400

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