<< Scientists have long held the belief that planets – including Earth – were built from rocky asteroids, but new research challenges that view >>
Planets like earth may have had muddy origins. July 14, 2017
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-07-planets-earth-muddy.html
<< It would have been a mud, rather than a rock >>
Philip A. Bland, Bryan J. Travis. Giant convecting mud balls of the early solar system. Science Advances 14 Jul 2017: Vol. 3, no. 7, e1602514 doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1602514
<< Music is thought to engage its listeners by driving feelings of surprise, tension, and relief through a dynamic mixture of predictable and unpredictable patterns, a property summarized (..) [by AA] as "expressiveness" >>
<< birds render their songs more expressive by subtly modifying note timing patterns, similar to musical operations like accelerando or ritardando >>
AA << findings bear consequences for neuronal models of vocal sequence generation in birds, as they require non-local rules to generate rhythm >>
Tina C Roeske, Damian Kelty-Stephen, Sebastian Wallot. Birds have swing: Multifractal analysis reveals expressive rhythm in birdsong. BioRxiv June 29, 2017 doi: 10.1101/157594
http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/29/157594
<< A veery thrush, ready to join the band >>
Michael Le Page. Swinging birds play with rhythm like jazz musicians. July 14, 2017
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140543-swinging-birds-play-with-rhythm-like-jazz-musicians/
Lang Elliott. Veery Thrush. June 1, 2010
<< DNA origami is a technique that uses hundreds of short DNA oligonucleotides, called staple strands, to fold a long single-stranded DNA, which is called a scaffold strand, into various designer nanoscale architectures >>
Hong F, Zhang F, et al. DNA Origami: Scaffolds for Creating Higher Order Structures. Chem Rev. 2017 Jun 12. doi: 10.1021/acs.chemrev.6b00825.
<< Animals use disruptive colouration to prevent detection or recognition by potential predators or prey. Highly contrasting elements within colour patterns, including vertical or horizontal bars, are thought to be effective at distracting attention away from body form and reducing detection likelihood. >>
AA << results provide evidence that fish camouflage is more complex than it initially appears, with likely many factors influencing the detection likelihood of prey by relevant predators >>
Phillips GAC, How MJ, et al. Disruptive colouration in reef fish: does matching the background reduce predation risk? J Exp Biol. 2017 Jun 1;220 (Pt 11): 1962-1974 doi: 10.1242/jeb.151480
<< We are more than the sum of our genes. Epigenetic mechanisms modulated by environmental cues such as diet, disease or lifestyle take a (..) role in regulating the DNA by switching genes on and off >>
AA << focused on a particular modification called H3K27me3 that can also be found in humans >>
Max Planck Society. Epigenetics between the generations: Researchers prove that we inherit more than just genes. July 14, 2017
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-07-epigenetics-inherit-genes.html
Fides Zenk, Eva Loeser, et al. Germ line–inherited H3K27me3 restricts enhancer function during maternal-to-zygotic transition. Science 14 Jul 2017: Vol. 357, Issue 6347, pp. 212-216 doi: 10.1126/science.aam5339
<< Why do many hosts accept costly avian brood parasitism even when parasitic eggs and nestlings differ dramatically in appearance from their own? Scientists argue that evolutionary lag or equilibrium can explain this evolutionary enigma. Few, however, consider the potential of parasitic birds to enforce acceptance by destroying eggs or nestlings of hosts that eject parasitic eggs and thereby reject parasitism. This retaliatory “mafia” behavior has been reported in one species of parasitic cuckoo but never in parasitic cowbirds. >>
AA << present experimental evidence of mafia behavior in the brown-headed cowbird (Molothrus ater ) >>
Jeffrey P. Hoover, Scott K. Robinson. Retaliatory mafia behavior by a parasitic cowbird favors host acceptance of parasitic eggs. PNAS 2007 vol. 104 no. 11: 4479–4483 doi: 10.1073/pnas.0609710104
http://m.pnas.org/content/104/11/4479
Andy Coghlan. Cuckoos use mafia-style tactics to raise young. March 5, 2007
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11314-cuckoos-use-mafia-style-tactics-to-raise-young/
Brown-headed cowbird
<< Internet users have a variety of format options in which to store their movies, and biologists have now joined the party. Researchers have used the microbial immune system CRISPR–Cas to encode a movie into the genome of the bacterium Escherichia coli. >>
<< “Cells have this privileged access to all sorts of information,” he [Seth Shipman] says. “I would like to have these molecular recordings functioning in the developing nervous system and recording information.” >>
Heidi Ledford. Lights, camera, CRISPR: Biologists use gene editing to store movies in DNA. Technique demonstrated in E. coli suggests ways to record key events in a cell's life. July 12, 2017
Shipman, S. L., Nivala, J., et al. Nature doi: 10.1038/nature23017 (2017).
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23017.epdf
Also
2073 - a few hints of our presence. Oct 13, 2006.
http://inkpi.blogspot.it/2006/10/2073-few-hints-of-our-presence.html
