Monthly Archives: July 2018

Do spiders have a favorite color?

Scientists recently discovered the aptly named peacock jumping spiders have the color vision needed to appreciate the male's gaudy display.

Now biologists at the University of Cincinnati are studying whether that ability translates to the more humdrum-looking wolf spiders that are muted browns and tans instead of electric blue, fiery orange and stoplight red.

UC biology professor...

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Flies meet gruesome end under influence of puppeteer fungus

Carolyn Elya discovered the puppet-master on the balcony of her Berkeley apartment. It was a fungus that infects fruit flies, invading their nervous system and eating them from the inside out.

In their death throes, the infected flies -- like puppets on a string -- obligingly climb to a high point and spread their wings, exposing...

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Animal taxonomy: Outwardly identical, yet distinct

Up until quite recently, the animal phylum Placozoa enjoyed a unique position in animal systematics. It was the only phylum to which only a single species had ever been assigned: Trichoplax adhaerens. Now, however, at team led by Professor Gert Wörheide of LMU's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and GeoBio-Center has discovered that placozoan...

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Fruit flies farm their own probiotics

The role of bacteria inhabiting our bodies is increasingly recognized as part of our wellbeing. It is in our intestines that the most diverse and significant bacteria community is located. It is believed that the manipulation of this community -- named microbiota -- can contribute to solve some diseases. However, to enable it, it is...

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Creating a (synthetic) song from a zebra finch's muscle

Birds create songs by moving muscles in their vocal organs to vibrate air passing through their tissues. While previous research reported that each of the different muscles controls one acoustic feature, new research shows that these muscles act in concert to create sound.

An international team of researchers describes how zebra finches produce songs in the...

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Gene therapy: Better adenine base editing system

Two research teams from East China Normal University and Sun Yat-Sen University in China have developed and improved the ABE system in mouse and rat strains, which has great implications for human genetic disorders and gene therapy. The research has been published by Springer Nature in two articles in the open access journal Protein &...

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