Biologists at The University of Nottingham and University College Dublin have announced a major breakthrough in our understanding of the sex life of a microscopic fungus which is a major cause of death in immune deficient patients and also a cause of severe asthma.

The discovery of a sexual cycle in the fungal pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus is highly significant in understanding the biology and evolution of the species and will shed new light on its ability to adapt to new environments and its resistance to antifungal drugs. It is hoped the results of this research will lead to new ways of controlling this deadly disease and improved treatments for patients infected with it.

Herbicide use should increase crop yields, that's the whole point, and herbicides and pesticides do that, given the output in food production that has matched the population increases over the last two centuries.  But there may be a problem in how some herbicides impact reproduction and tests may not be accounting for that, says a study in the Journal of Environmental Quality.

A team of scientists from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has reported a rapid recovery of coral reefs in areas of Indonesia, following the tsunami that devastated coastal regions throughout the Indian Ocean four years ago today.

The WCS team, working in conjunction with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (ARCCoERS) along with government, community and non-government partners, has documented high densities of "baby corals" in areas that were severely impacted by the tsunami.

First, a neat little toy:  build your own squid! I won't give anything else away...

Second, in the spirit of ending the old year and beginning the new, I like this synopsis of the best science stories of 2008, from Science.  Some nice videos too.

The 12th edition of Berry Go Round, the botanical blog carnival, is now online at Foothills Fancies.  Lots of good reading to be had.

There's a discussion going on over at Wikipedia regarding the naming convention for articles about plants.  In general, article titles are supposed to be the "most common" name for the thing in English.  But when you're trying to compile "the sum total of human knowledge", that simple rule can be problematic.  Do you really want to use "the most common" name, or do you want to use the most accurate name?  After all, Wikipedia seeks to be an encyclopaedia.

Things get far worse when you try to write articles about plant species.  There are about a quarter million species of flowering plants.  Most of them lack common names in English.  But where they exist, common nam

In a closed system (and the biosphere as a whole is a closed system) the only way to generate additional species is through evolution. 

While the evolution of new species is a necessary condition for the generation of diversity, it isn't good enough on its own.  If a species splits into two daughter lineages that are unable to interbreed, you should have two species.  But in order for them to coexist in a given area, some sort of ecological difference needs to have evolved.  If two species occupy the same area, they are in a position to compete for resources.  The more similar their needs, the more intense the competition is likely to be. 

If you set out to answer questions about species diversity, there are two questions you need to consider - how is diversity generated, and how is diversity maintained?

One night each year, tiny magic reindeer pull Santa and his toy-filled sleigh around the world. Their names are Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen and maybe Rudolph (or Robbie, if you're under the age of 30 - editors), and flying reinder are an impressive feat, especially on a site with some very cranky physicists who take that sort of thing literally.

But what about the non-magical reindeer that don't fly, don't have cool names and who spend each day moving throughout the Alaskan and Canadian tundra hanging out with caribou rather than elves? Don't they deserve some attention too?

On a science site they sure do.

In my recent post on Mexican dry forest, I mentioned the fact that about 80% of the species in the genus Bursera were endemic to Mexico.  Things like that tend to jump out at you.  Why are there so many species in one area, relative to the rest of its range?

Deleted due to this websites censorship

As a former dog owner and dog lover, I was not really surprised by last week's report that dogs have been found to "sense inequity", a.k.a. be jealous of the dog that's being treated better than they are.

Scientists did a very simple experiment- they asked two side-by-side dogs to perform a trick, then only rewarded one of the dogs with a treat.  Who wouldn't be jealous of that?  Eventually the non-rewarded dogs stopped doing the trick (smart dogs!). 

Last weekend I visited the St. Louis Zoo to witness their first ever Penguin Walk.

Annemarie Surlykke from the University of Southern Denmark is fascinated by echolocation. She really wants to know how it works. Surlykke equates the ultrasound cries that bats use for echolocation with the beam of light from a torch: you won't see much with the light from a small bulb but you could see several hundred metres with a powerful beam.

Sometimes while doing science, one is struck by something in the same way that one is affected by beautiful art.

Not that these are the most amazing images ever (they weren't meant to be artistic, just routine work), but I enjoyed them. They're from a project on rotifers by one of my undergraduate thesis students. They're both of Adineta vaga: the first is of the whole animal (the pink spots are the DNA), the second is the musculature on a confocal laser microscope. (Photos by K. Ashforth).

The wild pea pod is big and heavy, with seemingly little prayer of escaping the shade of its parent plant.

And yet, like a grounded teenager who knows where the car keys are hidden, it manages – if it has a reasonable chance of escape.

University of Florida researchers working at the world's largest experimental landscape devoted to wildlife corridors – greenways that link woods or other natural areas — have discovered the pea and similar species share, given a clear shot, a mysterious ability for mobility. Though their seeds are neither dispersed by birds nor borne by the wind, they are nevertheless far more likely to slalom down corridors than slog through woods.

Keeping tropical rain forests intact is a better way to combat climate change than replacing them with biofuel plantations, according to a new study published in Conservation Biology.

The study reveals that it would take at least 75 years for the carbon emissions saved through the use of biofuels to compensate for the carbon lost through forest conversion. And if the original habitat was carbon-rich peatland, the carbon balance would take more than 600 years. On the other hand, planting biofuels on degraded Imperata grasslands instead of tropical rain forests would lead to a net removal of carbon in 10 years, the authors found.

You've heard it before.   According to the laws of physics, bees can't fly.   Yet fly they do.   And British zoologist Sir James Gray noticed something strange about dolphins in 1936.  He had observed the sea mammals swimming at a swift rate of more than 20 miles per hour, but his studies had concluded that the muscles of dolphins simply weren't strong enough to support those kinds of speeds. The conundrum came to be known as "Gray's Paradox." 

For decades the puzzle prompted much attention, speculation, and conjecture in the scientific community. But now, armed with cutting-edge flow measurement technology, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have tackled the problem and conclusively solved Gray's Paradox. 

A new frog species has been discovered in Panama and will be announced in the December issue of Journal of Herpetology by a research team led by STRI former visiting scientist Joseph Mendelson, from Zoo Atlanta.

The amphibian, a type of tree frog with bright reddish- and green-colored skin that grows to a length of 122 mm was discovered by Edgardo Griffith while working with Mendelson in El Valle. Mendelson was head of the Amphibian Recovery Project in 2005 under the STRI umbrella. Today, Griffith is the director of the El Níspero zoo's Amphibian Conservation Center in the Valle de Anton, working with the Houston Zoo.