Biology

Over 250 million years ago, cataclysmic volcanic activity wiped out nearly all life on earth. 65 million years ago, a meteor impact in the Yucatán drove the dinosaurs to extinction. In the past 540 million years of earth’s history, paleontologists have…

A worker fire ant is steadily traversing the landscape looking for a good meal to take back to the nest. Suddenly, it finds a lizard basking in the sun lying directly in its path. Undaunted, the ant goes back to the nearest foraging trail and recruits…

“An inordinate fondness for beetles” is what the celebrated biologist J.B.S. Haldane apocryphally quipped when asked his opinion of God. purchasing levitra Beetles comprise just under a third of the 1.2 million species described so far [], and a recent…

-- In 1985, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) began tracking the prevalence of obesity in the United States. Since then, a clear trend has emerged: obesity is on the rise... If you’re wondering why the CDC is tracking obesity, it’s because those…

-- When Steve Jobs died on October 5th of this year, global attention turned to his cause of death – pancreatic cancer. Many people had questions: Would his fate have been different if he hadn’t elected for alternative treatments in the early days of his…

-- In 1973, a young scientist by the name of Ralph Steinman became the first person to identify and describe an unusual immune cell called the dendritic cell. At a time when immunology was dominated by research on cell types known as B cells and T cells,…

-- Are there other planets like Earth out there? Could they be places that future generations could eventually live? Is our Solar System somehow special? Current research on exoplanets – planets orbiting stars other than our own – aims to answer these…

-- As reported in a recent issue of the Flash, in the 1990s scientists found they could extend lifespan in yeast and roundworms through caloric restriction, providing the bare minimum set of nutrients necessary for survival. Other groups extended these…

-- On a Monday morning, as he was sorting through Petri dishes of Staphylococci he had left on his laboratory bench before going on vacation, Dr. Alexander Fleming noticed one that had become contaminated with mold. Fungal contamination was not…

-- Every organism is an incredibly complex machine whose biological processes benefit from 3.6 billion years of refinement through natural selection. Thus, it should not be surprising that designing biological systems is still difficult for scientists…