Biology Industry News

Developing methods for anticipating the emergence or reemergence of infectious diseases is both important and timely; however, traditional model-based approaches are stymied by uncertainty...

Innate colour preferences in insects were long considered to be a non-flexible representation of a floral ‘search image’ guiding insects to flowers during initial foraging trips. However, these colour...

As people get older, they often feel less energetic, mobile or active. This may be due in part to a decline in mitochondria, the tiny powerhouses inside of our cells, which provide energy and regulate metabolism...

With exciting new NASA plans for a sustainable return to the moon, astronauts will once again leave Earth’s protective magnetosphere only to endure higher levels of radiation from galactic cosmic...

Vitellogenesis ("yolking" of follicles) is a bioenergetically costly stage of reproduction requiring enlargement of the liver to produce vitellogenin (VTG) yolk precursor proteins, which are transported and deposited...

The fast-start escape response is the main locomotor behavior observed in fish to evade predatory attacks and thereby increase their probability of survival. Thus far, this high speed sensory...

Larval stages of members of the Abulacraria superphylum including echinoderms and hemichordates have highly alkaline midguts. To date, the reason for the evolution of such extreme pH conditions...

Identification of target genes that mediate required functions downstream of transcription factors is hampered by the large number of genes whose expression changes when the factor is removed...

When heated, insects lose coordinated movement followed by the onset of heat coma (CTmax). These traits are popular measures to quantify inter- and intraspecific differences in insect heat tolerance...

The ability of bones to sense and respond to mechanical loading is a central feature of vertebrate skeletons. However, the functional demands imposed on terrestrial and aquatic animals differ vastly. The pectoral...

Many animals need to process numerical and quantity information in order to survive. Spontaneous quantity discrimination allows differentiation between two or more quantities without reinforcement...

Arboreal environments present considerable biomechanical challenges for animals moving and foraging among substrates varying in diameter, orientation, and compliance. Most studies of quadrupedal...

Despite over a billion years of evolutionary divergence, several thousand human genes possess clearly identifiable orthologs in yeast, and many have undergone lineage-specific duplications in one or both...

Flying insects are remarkable in their ability to sense and locate food sources and mates as they navigate a complex, 3-D world. Yet, little is known about how they combine different sensory...

Many animals use information from conspecifics to change their behavior in adaptive ways. When a rock ant, Temnothorax albipennis, finds food, she returns to her colony and uses a method called tandem...

Standard infectious disease practice calls for aggressive drug treatment that rapidly eliminates the pathogen population before resistance can emerge. When resistance is absent, this elimination strategy can...

The discovery of a huge number of long non-protein coding RNAs, aka lncRNAs, in the mammalian genome was a major surprise of the recent large-scale genomics projects. An international team...

The Oxygen and Capacity-Limited Thermal Tolerance (OCLTT) hypothesis proposes that the thermal tolerance of an animal is shaped by its capacity to deliver oxygen in relation to oxygen demand. Studies...

Desert birds inhabit hot, dry environments that are becoming hotter and drier as a consequence of climate change. Extreme weather such as heatwaves can cause mass-mortality events that may...

Animals use auditory cues generated by defensive responses of others to detect impending danger. Here we identify a neural circuit in rats involved in the detection of one such auditory cue...