Author: Lori Jia

Canine Tumor Fuels Up by Stealing Parts From Host, Report Says

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, January 24, 2011

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When humans domesticated dogs at least 10,000 years ago, an apparent side effect was a bizarre new kind of parasite. A canine cancer gained the ability to spread from one dog to the next, creating new tumors along the way.

Today, it thrives in dog populations around the world. Scientists are now studying canine transmissible venereal tumors (or C.T.V.T.) to uncover the adaptations the disease uses to thrive in its peculiar way. In the current issue of Science, British scientists report that it upgrades its energy supply by stealing new parts from its canine hosts.

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The Primitive, Complicated, Essential Emotion Called Fear

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, February 15, 2010

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Any halfway decent thesaurus will provide a long list of synonyms for fear, and yet they are not very good substitutes. No one would confuse having the creeps with being terrified. It is strange that we have so many words for fear, when fear is such a unitary, primal feeling. Perhaps all those synonyms are just linguistic inventions. Perhaps, if we looked inside our brains, we would just find plain old fear.

That is certainly how things seemed in the early 1900s, when scientists began studying how we come to be scared of things. They built on Ivan Pavlov’s classic experiments on dogs, in which Pavlov would ring a bell before giving his dogs food. Eventually they learned to associate the bell with food and began to salivate in anticipation.

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Scientists Start a Genomic Catalog of Earth’s Abundant Microbes

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, December 28, 2009

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If you want to appreciate the diversity of life on earth, you will need a microscope.

There are about 5,400 species of mammals on the planet, but just a spoonful of soil may contain twice as many species of microbes. They can dwell in habitats where so-called higher life forms like us would quickly die, including acid-drenched mines and Antarctic deserts. By one rough estimate, there may be, all told, 150 million species of microbes.

“Microbes represent the vast majority of organisms on earth,” said Hans-Peter Klenk, a microbiologist for the German Collection of Micro-organisms and Cell Cultures, a government microbiology research center.

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#97: Tropical Heat Speeds Up Evolution

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, December 16, 2009

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If alien biologists were on an expedition to Earth, it would not take long for them to realize that there are a lot more species in the tropics than there are in temperate regions. “It’s the biggest, most obvious pattern in nature,” says Len Gillman, an evolutionary ecologist at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. Why that pattern exists has been a long-standing puzzle. This year, however, Gillman found a possible answer: A warm climate makes life evolve more quickly.

Gillman and his colleagues compared 130 closely related pairs of mammal species. In each case, one species lived at a higher latitude or elevation than the other.

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The First, and Greatest, Reality Show: Evolutionary Biology

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, November 23, 2009

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Anne Gaskett, a Cornell University biol­ogist, spends her days crouching quietly next to orchids in Australia. It may seem like an uneventful way to pass the time, but she is actually observing a marvelous act of sexual deception. The flowers are fooling wasps into making love to them.

Male wasps normally seek out females by sniffing for their pheromones, signaling chemicals that they produce. Each species makes a unique pheromone, which means that male wasps rarely end up with the wrong females.

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