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| A HELPING HAND FROM THE ‘GRANDPARENTS’ |
| A team of scientists led by the University of East Anglia has discovered the existence of ‘grandparent’ helpers in the Seychelles warbler – the first time this behaviour, which rarely occurs except in humans, has been observed in birds. |
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| Indonesia's 'Lost World' reveals more surprises. 2 mammals believed new to science discovered in pristine wilderness |
| A tiny possum and a giant rat were recorded by scientists as probable new species on a recent expedition to Indonesia’s remote and virtually unknown “Lost World” in the pristine wilderness of western New Guinea’s Foja Mountains. |
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| NEW 'BUMPY' JELLY FOUND IN DEEP SEA |
| Wart-like bumps of stinging cells cover the feeding arms and bell of a newly described deep-sea jelly, published by MBARI biologists in this month's issue of the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom. This softball-sized, translucent jelly moves through the water like a shooting star, trailing four fleshy oral arms--but no tentacles--behind it. This and other unique features resulted in the jelly's categorization as a new genus and species. |
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| SLEAZY FLORAL NIGHTCLUB LURES BEETLES |
| When South American scarab beetles want a hot date they head for a bizarre flower that offers a steamy nightclub atmosphere, according to a new study. |
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| DEAD AS A DODO? NOT NECESSARILY |
| Just because an animal hasn't been seen for a long time, doesn't mean it's extinct, according to statistical research that sheds new light on the plight of the dodo. |
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| RED SEA URCHINS DISCOVERED TO BE ONE OF EARTH'S OLDEST ANIMALS |
| A new study has concluded that the red sea urchin, a small spiny invertebrate that lives in shallow coastal waters, is among the longest living animals on Earth - they can live to be 100 years old, and some may reach 200 years or more in good health with few signs of age. |
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| NIGHT-FARTING FISH PUZZLE RESEARCHERS |
| Herring fish have a secret nocturnal habit of squeezing gas bubbles out of their anal pores, producing distinctive noises like someone blowing raspberries, a quirky new study by Canadian and U.K. researchers has revealed. |
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| MAGIC NUMBER TELLS WHEN TO CHANGE SEX |
| From tiny shrimps to massive fish, many species change sex once they reach a certain size, and British researchers have now discovered an amazing universal rule: that they all tend to do this at the same relative size. |
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| NEW GECKO ALREADY UNDER THREAT |
| An ancient species of gecko just discovered in remote northern Australia is already under threat from dwindling habitat. |
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| ANCIENT MUTANT POLLEN OUT FOR THE COUNT |
| Conifer tree pollen from 250 million years ago show the same mutations as those of modern pines hit by fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, a new study has found. |
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| STARTLING DEEP-SEA ENCOUNTER WITH RARE, MASSIVE GREENLAND SHARK. |
| During a recent submersible dive 3,000 feet down in the Gulf of Maine a HARBOR BRANCH scientist and sub pilot had the first face-to-face meeting ever in the deep sea with a rare Greenland shark. The docile 15-foot creature gently rammed into the submersible's clear front sphere before turning and swimming slowly away. |
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| WASP AND VIRUS ALLIANCE BEAT MOTH |
| A parasitic wasp that injects its eggs into the leek moth - a serious agricultural pest - also adds a lethal virus that stops the moth’s immune system from harming the eggs, according to a new study. |
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| SARS ORIGIN A MYSTERY, RE-BIRTH FEARED |
| Despite the discovery of animals in a Chinese live-meat market infected with a virus similar to the one that caused the global SARS outbeak, the source of the disease remains a mystery. |
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| YOUNG SEA ANIMALS CLONE THEMSELVES-CENTURY-OLD DEBATE HALTED |
| After more than a century of intensive study, scientists have assumed that larvae of non-parasitic invertebrates reproduce only very rarely, but new research by University of Alberta scientists overthrows this conventional wisdom. Graduate student Alexandra Eaves and Dr. Richard Palmer, from the U of A's Faculty of Science, have found that asexual cloning by some marine invertebrate larvae is not as rare and enigmatic a phenomenon as previously assumed. |
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| FISHING FOR PHOTOS OF RARE OR UNKNOWN DEEP-SEA CREATURES WITH AN ELECTRONIC JELLYFISH LURE |
| Using a new lighted jellyfish lure and a unique camera system, researchers from HARBOR BRANCH are working to reveal for the first time life in the deep sea unaltered by the cacophony of sound and light that have been an integral part of most past research there. From Sept 2-5 a team will be using the lure for the first time in the dark depths of California's Monterey Bay. |
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| NURSERIES IN THE DEEP SEA |
| MOSS LANDING, California--Exploring a deep-sea ridge off Northern California, scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) have discovered a unique undersea nursery, where groups of fish and octopus brood their eggs, like chickens on their nests. This is the first time that marine biologists have directly observed any deep-sea fish brooding its eggs. It is also the first time that two different types of mobile deep-sea animals have been observed brooding together in the same area. Although the scientists do not know exactly why the animals prefer this one area, they believe that the nursery represents a new type of biological "hot spot" (an area of intense biological activity). |
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| SPIDER CLEARED OF CAUSING FLESH-EATING ULCER |
| The white-tail spider, whose bite has been blamed for cases of flesh-eating ulcers for decades, has been declared innocent following methodical Australian research. |
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| BACTERIA START UNDERGROUND FIRES IN MALI |
| Patches of mysterious shoe-melting, foot-roasting hot ground in parts of West Africa may have been caused by bacteria, not volcanic activity as has been thought for decades. |
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| BIZARRE PARASITE BUG JOINS WAR BETWEEN THE SEXES |
| A new player has emerged in the war of the sexes: a bizarre 'ultra-selfish' bacterial parasite that hijacks animal reproduction to promote their own existence by favouring female hosts over males, according to a British report. |
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| CANNIBAL BACTERIA EAT THEIR BROTHERS AND SISTERS |
| Some bacteria ensure their survival during famine by killing their siblings and eating them in order to avoid hibernating, an American-Spanish team has found. |
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| THREE NEW KINGDOMS OF LIFE DISCOVERED IN ALPINE REGION |
| Four complete new kingdoms of life have been discovered by American researchers in the high alpine environment of Colorado, rewriting the textbooks on microbes. |
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| ANCIENT DUNG REVEALS A PICTURE OF THE PAST |
| The successful dating of the most ancient genetic material yet may allow scientists to use preserved DNA from sources such as mammoth dung to help paint a picture of past environments. |
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| BI-SEX BIRD BRAIN QUESTIONS ORIGIN OF GENDER |
| Sex differences in the brain may be genetic and not just hormonal, according to U.S. researchers who gained the insight after studying a rare hermaphrodite finch. |
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| HUMUNGOUS FUNGUS: WORLD'S LARGEST ORGANISM? |
| The discovery of the world's largest fungus - up to 8,500 years old and carperting nearly 10 square kilometres of forest floor - has raised questions about what constitutes an individual organism. |
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| ALARM AS KILLER VIRUS SPREADS, RESIDENTS FLEE. |
| Medical teams descended on a Hong Kong apartment block on Tuesday to find out why a virus thought to cause atypical pneumonia has spread like wildfire, as fears grow it has mutated into an airborne infection. |
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| PINE TREES MAY HELP CREATE SMOG, ACID RAIN |
| Rather than being a global warming solution, pine trees may be inducing smog and acid rain by releasing vast amounts of nitrogen oxide into the air, researchers have discovered. |
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| CROWS BETTER TOOL-MAKERS THAN CHIMPANZEES |
| New Caledonia's unique crows are more sophisticated at making and using tools than man's closest relatives, the chimpanzees, New Zealand researchers have discovered. |
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| MICE HAVE A SPECIAL NOSE FOR LOVE, RESEARCHERS FIND |
| Mice on the prowl for a mate use an essential but unexpected organ - a 'second nose' which figures out gender, status and even if romantic feelings are mutual, scientists have discovered. |
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| PATAGONIAN TOOTHFISH MAY MIGRATE BETWEEN POLES |
| A Patagonian toothfish, a species thought to be exclusive to Antarctica, has been captured off Greenland in the Arctic circle - suggesting the cold-loving deepwater fish may migrate between polar regions. |
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| PREHISTORIC TUSKS POINT TO EARLIEST FOSSIL EVIDENCE OF DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SEXES. FINDINGS POINT TO COMPLEX SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR. |
| The large tusks of an animal that roamed Earth before the dinosaurs may provide the earliest evidence yet of male-female distinctions in land animals that existed millions of years ago, say U of T scientists. |
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| BREATHING WITHOUT LUNGS: HOW INSECTS DO IT |
| Insects don't have lungs, so how do they breathe? Using tiny air sacs no-one even knew existed, according to American scientists who have taken the first close-up views of the process. |
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| PALAEONTOLOGISTS IN A FLAP OVER FOUR-WINGED DINOSAURS |
| The discovery of fossils in China with feathers on both their front and hind limbs has given the 'gliding' theory of the origins of flight an enormous boost. |
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| NEW AUSTRALIAN TRUFFLE GENUS UNEARTHED |
| A new species of truffle discovered in Western Australia, belonging to a whole new genus, has excited fungi experts the world over - but the specimens are so rare, no-one has dared to taste one. |
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| NEW-FOUND FLOWER SPECIES NEEDS NO SUNLIGHT |
| It looks strange, lives underground, has no leaves and doesn't need sunlight: meet the newest species of the mysterious fairy lantern plant discovered in southeastern Australia. |
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| RESEARCH FINDS LIFE 1000 FEET BENEATH OCEAN FLOOR |
| A new study has discovered an abundance of microbial life deep beneath the ocean floor in ancient basalt that forms part of the Earth's crust, in research that once more expands the realm of seemingly hostile or remote environments in which living organisms can apparently thrive. |
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| MICROORGANISM ISOLATED IN SPACE |
| How far up into the sky does the biosphere extend? Do microorganisms exist at heights of 40 km and in what quantity? To answer these questions several research institutes in India collaborated on a path-breaking project to send balloon-borne sterile "cryosamplers" into the stratosphere. The programme was led by cosmologist Professor Jayant Narlikar, Director of the Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, with scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Studies contributing their various expertise. |
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| ION CHANNELS ALLOW BACTERIA TO RESIST STOMACH ACID |
| Researchers have found that a primitive type of ion channel similar to those found in mammalian nerve cells helps bacteria resist the blast of acid they encounter in the stomach of their hosts. |
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| VENUS MAY BE HIDING LIFE |
| The acidic clouds of Venus could in fact be hiding life. Unlikely as it sounds, the presence of microbes could neatly explain several mysterious observations of the planet's atmosphere. |
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| DNA’S OSCILLATING DOUBLE HELIX HINDERS ELECTRICAL CONDUCTION |
| DNA has an oscillating double-helix structure. This oscillating means that the DNA molecules conduct electricity much less well than was previously thought. Ultrafast cameras were one of the devices the researchers from Amsterdam used to demonstrate this. |
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| PTEROSAURS ATE ON THE FLY |
| Palaeontologists working in South America think they may have discovered a new species of pterosaur that skimmed over the surface of water to catch its food. |
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| GIANT SQUID LIVED IN SHALLOW WATERS |
| A giant squid found washed up in Tasmania has challenged traditional thinking that giant squid live in the depths of the sea.
The new giant squid washed up at Seven Mile Beach, east of Hobart, over the weekend. |
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| NEW WAY FOUND TO SEE LIGHT THROUGH NOVEL PROTEIN IDENTIFIED BY DARTMOUTH GENETICISTS |
| Dartmouth Medical School geneticists have discovered a new class of proteins that see light, revealing a previously unknown system for how light works. |
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| AFRICAN PREDATOR 'REDISCOVERED' IN TANZANIA |
| A WCS scientist working in southeastern Tanzania has rediscovered a carnivore that has remained undetected for the last 70 years. Photographed by a camera trap on the eastern side of Udzungwa Mountain National Park, the Lowe's servaline genet - a three-foot-long relative of the mongoose family - was previously known only from a single skin collected in 1932. |
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| STUDY OF FOSSILS FOUND IN ARCTIC SHOWS PLANTS MORE DEVELOPED AT EARLIER TIME |
| Along with Canadian colleagues, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill scientist has discovered fossils of plants dating back some 420 million years. |
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| BOTANISTS DISCOVER NEW CONIFER SPECIES IN VIETNAM |
| An unusual conifer found in a remote area of northern Vietnam has been identified as a genus and species previously unknown to science. The limestone ridges where the tree grows are among the most botanically rich areas in Vietnam, said Daniel Harder, currently director of the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) Arboretum and a co-discoverer of the new species. The discovery is published in the current issue of the journal Novon. |
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| EARLIEST EVIDENCE OF ANIMALS YET? |
| Scientists say they have found fossil evidence of an "animal-like" creature which they report is twice as old as any animal fossils generally accepted by palaeontologists. |
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| SCIENTISTS PUSH BACK PRIMATE ORIGINS FROM 65 MILLION TO 85 MILLION YEARS AGO. FIELD MUSEUM SCIENTIST CHALLENGES ACCEPTED THEORIES, DATING METHODS. |
| New research that accounts for gaps in the fossil record challenges traditional methods of interpreting fossils and constructing evolutionary trees. Applying a new statistical approach to primates demonstrates that this group-from which humans developed-originated 85 million years ago (Mya) rather than 65 Mya, as is widely accepted. |
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| UCLA SCIENTISTS, COLLEAGUES SUBSTANTIATE BIOLOGICAL ORIGIN OF EARLIEST FOSSILS |
| UCLA paleobiologist J. William Schopf and colleagues have substantiated the biological origin of the earliest known cellular fossils, which are 3.5 billion years old. The research is published in the March 7 issue of the journal Nature. |
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| UNDERGRAD FINDS CLUES TO 400- MILLION-YEAR-OLD MYSTERY |
| Steven Porter, a Johns Hopkins University senior from Cherry Hill, N.J., has conducted original research that adds new and potentially decisive evidence to a debate about the identity of one of the first organisms to make the epochal leap from the sea to dry land approximately 400 million years ago. |
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| ALIEN LIFE FORMS MORE LIKELY TO BE FOUND OUTSIDE SOLAR SYSTEM, SAYS COLORADO PROF |
| The chance of detecting life outside our own solar system probably is greater than discovering it on neighboring planets and moons like Mars or Europa, a moon of Jupiter, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder professor. |
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| THE NEW BIOLOGY OF ROCKS: 'ARE THERE MEDICAL IMPLICATIONS OF GEOMICROBIOLOGY?' |
| If microbial life is found on Mars, will it be native to the planet or something carried there from Earth? Either way, will it be safe to return samples of such organisms to Earth? Astrobiology, the search for life elsewhere, says a University of Illinois microbiologist, is making us look a lot closer at microbial life on Earth – how it adapts and its relationship to emerging infectious diseases. |
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| NEW FRONTIERS FOR DINOSAUR SCIENCE |
| Sereno's ongoing field work in Africa has yielded a menagerie of new dinosaurs. These discoveries have included the giant predator, Carcharodontosaurus, which rivaled Tyrannosaurus in size. Another find was the fleet-footed meat-eater, Deltadromeus, that has no close counterpart on other continents; and the spinosaur, Suchomimus. Giant long-necked plant-eaters, found in a communal death site, included the 60-foot long Jobaria. |
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| ROCK-EATING MICROBES SURVIVE IN DEEP OCEAN OFF PERU |
| Way down deep in the ocean off the coast of Peru, in the rocks that form the sea floor, live bacteria that don't need sunlight, don't need carbon dioxide, don't need oxygen. These microbes subsist by eating the very rocks they call home. |
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| COMMON MICROBES SURVIVE PRESSURES EQUAL TO THOSE FOUND AT 50 KILOMETERS INSIDE THE EARTH’S CRUST |
| Until now, scientists thought that only specially adapted organisms they call extremophiles could exist in seemingly intolerable environments such as high-pressure, high-temperature oceanic hydrothermal vents or in the ice sheets of Antarctica. A study published in the February 22, 2002, issue of Science, however, shows that even common bacteria are viable under high-pressure conditions equivalent to about 50 kilometers beneath the Earth’s crust or 160 kilometers in a hypothetical sea. |
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| ANTARCTIC MICROBES COULD LIVE ON MARS |
| New Zealand and Canadian scientists have uncovered microbes in Antarctica that live in hostile conditions mirroring those on Mars.
The scientists discovered long-lived colonies of insecticidal fungi and a common species of Penicillium bacteria at two sites in Antarctica's Dry Valleys - so-called because they are ice-free - living three to eight centimetres beneath the surface. |
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| WORLD'S SMALLEST LIZARD DISCOVERED IN THE CARIBBEAN |
| The world's smallest lizard has been discovered on a tiny Caribbean island off the coast of the Dominican Republic. The newly discovered species not only ranks as the smallest lizard, but it also is the smallest of all 23,000 species of reptiles, birds, and mammals, according to a paper to be published in the December issue of the Caribbean Journal of Science by Blair Hedges, an evolutionary biologist at Penn State, and Richard Thomas, a biologist at the University of Puerto Rico. |
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| WHAT MAKES EUROPA PINK? DOES EUROPA'S ROSY GLOW BETRAY A FLOURISHING COLONY OF BUGS? |
| The red tinge of Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, could be caused by frozen bits of bacteria. Their presence would also help explain Europa's mysterious infrared signal. |
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| MEGA COCKROACH |
| A 300-million-year-old cockroach fossil has been found in a mine site in the United States. And it's huge.
The cockroach, which lived in the Carboniferous period, 55 million years before dinosaurs, was found in a coal mine in eastern Ohio by Cary Easterday, a graduate student in geological science at Ohio State University. |
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| COMPLEX MOLECULE FOUND IN SPACE |
| The compound vinyl alcohol has been found in space, raising hopes of clues to the origin of complex organic molecules. The molecule was found in an interstellar cloud of dust and gas near the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy by radio astronomers using the National Science Foundation's 12 Meter Telescope at Kitt Peak, Arizona. |
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| HUGE DINOSAUR FIND IN QUEENSLAND |
| The biggest dinosaur fossil ever found in Australia was announced yesterday at the Queensland Museum. Dubbed 'Elliott', the sauropod dinosaur was found near Winton in western Queensland.
Dr Steve Salisbury, honorary research fellow at the museum, said the fossil could represent the first evidence of a unique group of sauropods. |
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| FOUND! THE LONGEST BIRD PENIS EVER |
| North American scientists have discovered the longest bird penis ever - a 42.5cm organ belonging to a duck. |
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