July 31, 2006, 7:03 AM CT

Bat in the House?

With hot, humid weather in full swing, some Bay State homeowners may discover bats residing in their home! Attics are the most common portion of a house in which bats roost and raise their young. After a few hot summer days, an attic becomes too warm for the bats, forcing them into people's living quarters as they search for cooler places to roost. Inexperienced young bats may fall down a chimney, fly in open windows or down attic stairs. The discovery of a bat flying through the house can create anything from excitement to hysteria. What's a homeowner to do?

Fortunately, a single bat flying in a room can commonly be dealt with quite easily. Put away that broom or tennis racket and close off the room containing the bat and open an outside window or door in that room. It's commonly only a matter of a few minutes of circling before the bat locates the open window and leaves the house. Bats do not attack people or fly into people's hair. If a bat has landed, it can be assisted out of a house in several ways. For a bat on a curtain, place a jar, coffee can or small box over the bat, carefully working the animal into the container, and cover it. A bat on the floor can be covered with a towel. Another method is to put on leather gloves and simply pick up the bat and release it outdoors-don't use cotton gloves or handle a bat with bare hands. Whatever method is used, don't worry when the bat squeaks loudly as you handle it. Take the bat outdoors and release it.........

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July 30, 2006, 0:39 AM CT

How The Brain Turns On Innate Behavior

UC Riverside scientists have made a major leap forward in understanding how the brain programs innate behavior. The discovery could have future applications in engineering new behaviors in animals and intelligent robots.

Innate or "instinctive" behaviors are inborn and do not require learning or previous experience to be performed. Examples include courtship and sexual behaviors, escape and defensive maneuvers, and aggression.

Using the common fruit fly as a model organism, the scientists found through laboratory experiments that the innate behavior is initiated by a "command" hormone that orchestrates activities in discrete groups of peptide neurons in the brain. Peptide neurons are brain cells that release small proteins to communicate with other brain cells and the body.

The scientists report that the command hormone, called ecdysis-triggering hormone or ETH, activates discrete groups of brain peptide neurons in a stepwise manner, making the fruit fly perform a well-defined sequence of behaviors. The scientists propose that similar mechanisms could account for innate behaviors in other animals and even humans.

Study results appear as the cover article in this week's issue of Current Biology.

"To our knowledge, we are the first to describe how a circulating hormone turns on sequential steps of an innate behavior by inducing programmed release of brain chemicals," said Young-Joon Kim, a postgraduate researcher in UCR's Department of Entomology working with Michael Adams, professor of cell biology and neuroscience and professor of entomology, and the first author of the paper. "It is well known that such behaviors - for example, sexual behavior or those correlation to aggression, escape or defense - are programmed in the brain, and all are laid down in the genome. We observed that not only do steps involved in innate behavior match exactly with discrete activities of the neurons in the brain but also that specific groups of peptide neurons are activated at very precise times, leading to each successive step of the behavioral sequence."........

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July 28, 2006, 10:37 PM CT

Pigeons provide clues

Through studying pigeons with genetic heart disease, researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine have discovered a clue about why some patients' heart vessels are prone to close back up after angioplasty.

"We identified a regulator of genes that controls the growth of artery smooth muscle cells," said William Wagner, Ph.D., senior researcher. "Learning to modulate the uncontrolled growth of these cells could potentially solve the problem of vessels re-closing after angioplasty".

The work is reported in the recent issue of Experimental and Molecular Pathology.

Angioplasty uses a balloon-like device to crush the material blocking an artery. But, within three to six months, even if a stent is placed in the artery to keep it open, the vessel becomes re-blocked in about 25 percent to 30 percent of patients. This process, known as restenosis, has been described as "over exuberant" tissue healing and involves the smooth muscle cells. It is not known why this happens in some people and not in others, but many scientists believe that genes are to blame, Wagner said.

The researchers sought to find the answer in two breeds of pigeons one that is genetically susceptible to heart attacks and heart vessel disease (white carneau) and one (show racer) that is resistant. A major difference between the two breeds is that smooth muscle cells from the heart vessels of white carneau pigeons are prone to uncontrolled growth.........

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July 28, 2006, 10:10 PM CT

From Farm Waste To Bio-oil

Samy Sadaka reached into a garbage bag, picked up a mixture of cow manure and corn stalks, let it run through his fingers and invited a visitor to do the same.

It wasn't that bad.

That mix of manure and corn stalks had spent 27 days breaking down in a special drying process. The end result looked like brown yard mulch with lots of thin fibers. There wasn't much smell. And it was dry to the touch.

"That's about 20 percent moisture," said Drew Simonsen, an Iowa State University sophomore from Quimby who's working on the research project led by Sadaka, an associate scientist for Iowa State's Center for Sustainable Environmental Technologies.

Other Iowa State scientists working on the project are Robert Burns, an associate professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering; Mark Hanna, an Extension agricultural engineer; Robert C. Brown, director of the Center for Sustainable Environmental Technologies and Bergles Professor in Thermal Science; and Hee-Kwon Ahn, a postdoctoral researcher for the department of agricultural and biosystems engineering.

The project is being supported by $190,000 in grants from the Iowa Biotechnology Byproducts Consortium.

The scientists are working to take wastes from Iowa farms -- manure and corn stalks -- and turn them into a bio-oil that could be used for boiler fuel and perhaps transportation fuel.........

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July 28, 2006, 9:39 PM CT

Cell-shaped Building In Making

An innovative cell-shaped building will house a new biomedical research institute in Chengdu, China, thanks to an unusual crossdisciplinary collaboration between Shuguang Zhang, a world-renowned bioengineer and scientist at MIT, and his former student, architecture major Sloan Kulper.

Kulper (S.B. 2003) designed the cell-shaped building for the Institute for Nanobiomedical Technology and Membrane Biology in Chengdu, China, the regional capital of Sichuan province in southwestern China. The proposed new facility will contain 170,000 square feet of laboratory, research and meeting spaces; it is slated for construction over the next three years. The building is intended to look like a cell from the outside and to include an assortment of forms inspired by molecular biology inside.

Shuguang Zhang, associate director of the Center for Biomedical Engineering, will serve as founding advisor of the new Nanobiomedical Institute, to be sited at Chengdu's Sichuan University, where Zhang received his undergraduate degree in biochemistry.

Zhang met Kulper in 2002, when he took Zhang's course, "Molecular Structure of Biological Materials: Structure, Foundation and Self-assembly".

In the class, Zhang frequently discusses the striking similarities between architecture and biological structures, he said. "Nature has produced abundant magnificent, intricate and fine molecular and cellular structures through billions of years of molecular selection and evolution.........

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July 26, 2006, 9:02 PM CT

Cougar Teh Mountain Lion

The cougar or mountain lion is a large and potentially dangerous animal that is a natural and rather common - but not often observed - inhabitant of Mount Rainier National Park. The scientific name of the cougar, Felis concolor, means "cat of one color." The animal is identified by its large size, cat-like appearance, uniformly gray to reddish-tan body color, and long tail - nearly three feet (1 m) long and a third of its total length. The muzzle and chest are white and there are black markings on the face, ears and tip of the tail; young kittens have black spots on the body. Adult male cougars can weigh over 150 lbs. (70 kg), females from 90 to 110 lbs. (40-50 kg), and sub-adults 40 to 80 lbs. (20-40 kg). Adult males often have a larger head, neck and shoulders and more husky appearance; females and subadults are often more lean and slender. Click on the picture of the cougar for a larger photograph.

Generally, adult cougars are solitary animals and come together only for mating. Kittens stay with their mother for up to two years. Females first breed at 18-24 months of age. The gestation period is 92 days, and kittens are born at two-to-three year intervals. Kittens are born with blue eyes and a spotted coat, but the spots gradually fade and disappear by age two. During late spring and summer, one to two-year old cougars become independent of their mothers. While attempting to find a home range, these young cougars may roam widely in search of unoccupied territory. This is when cougars are most likely to conflict with humans.........

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July 26, 2006, 5:39 PM CT

Coexistence Among Desert Rodents

The warm deserts of North America are hopping with multiple species of kangaroo rats and pocket mice despite limited seed resources. Why doesn't one species win out in the rat race? Ecologist Mary Price (University of California, Riverside and University of Arizona) and theoretical biologist John Mittler (University of Washington) teamed up to explore their hunch that coexistence might follow from the propensity of these rodents to store harvested seeds and to steal from one another's caches.

"I gave up on traditional explanations when we couldn't find size-related tradeoffs in foraging rates or predator avoidance under different environmental conditions" says Price, who has spent more than twenty years exploring niche-partitioning explanations for the remarkable diversity of desert rodent communities. "I always had a suspicion that caching was important because heteromyids are so obsessive about it".

Using resource-processing models of coexistence where feeding by one species creates a modified resource another can use, the researchers found that thievery actually promotes stable coexistence if one species excels at harvesting while to other excels at stealing.

"We can't conserve biodiversity if we don't understand the processes that maintain it," Price says. "There are far more ecological interactions to understand than there are ecologists, but fortunately, we can often extrapolate from one system to others".........

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July 26, 2006, 5:36 PM CT

Male praying mantids

Female praying mantids are notorious for sexual cannibalism that is, for eating their male partner during mating. However, the possibility that males may also have something to gain from this violent act has never been resolved experimentally. In a paper in the recent issue of The American Naturalist, Jonathan Lelito and William Brown (SUNY-Fredonia), study male risk-taking behavior in a praying mantis by altering the risk of cannibalism and observing changes in male behavior. They find that the males are able to assess the risk of cannibalism and become more cautious in the presence of especially hungry females.

"We know that hungry females are more likely to cannibalize and a head-on orientation makes it easier for her to attack the male with her predatory front legs," says Brown.

Lelito and Brown thus varied female hunger and physical orientation in order to assess how male mantids respond to variation in the risk of cannibalism. They observed that males responded to greater risk by slowing their approach, increasing courtship behavior, and mounting from a greater and possibly safer distance.

"This shows that male mantids actively assess variation in risk and change their behavior to reduce the chance of being cannibalized," explains Brown. "Males are clearly not complicit, and the act of sexual cannibalism in praying mantids is an example of extreme conflict between the sexes".........

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July 26, 2006, 5:24 PM CT

Worker Ants Store Fat To Share

In a fascinating new study from the September/October 2006 issue of Physiological and Biochemical Zoology, Daniel A. Hahn (University of Florida) explores the ability of ants to store excess fat and pass it to colony members through lipid-rich oral secretions or unfertilized eggs. For perennial organisms, such as ant colonies, investing heavily in nutrient stores when food availability is high is a potential bet-hedging strategy for dealing with times of famine.

"Understanding the regulation of nutrient reserves, especially fat storage, at the individual and colony levels is critical to understanding both the division of labor characteristics of social insect colonies and the evolution of important colony life-history traits such as the timing of reproduction, founding mode, and over-wintering behaviour," explains Hahn.

In order to better understand how individual fat storage tactics translated into colony-level resources, Hahn captured queens of different species and reared colonies under controlled laboratory conditions in nests for two years, feeding the ants a combination of frozen cockroach and moth eggs, mixed with honey, vitamins, and salt. He then sampled five colonies each of the two different species, and observed that, despite similar environments, darker workers and soldiers stored more fat per unit of lean mass than lighter ants did, but the lighter colony involved a greater proportion of soldiers in storage.........

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July 26, 2006, 5:13 PM CT

Evolutionary Origin Of Fins, Limbs

Gainesville, Fla. -- Performance on the dance floor may not always show it, but people are rarely born with two left feet. We have genes that instruct our arms and legs to grow in the right places and point in the right directions. They also provide for the spaces between our fingers and toes and every other formative detail of our limbs.

Evolutionarily speaking, the genetic instructions used to construct and position our limbs were being perfected more than half a billion years ago in fishes, not along the sides of the body where the fins that preceded human arms and legs sprouted, but at the midline that runs along the backbone and belly.

This midline -- think of the dorsal, tail and anal fins of a fish - is where the genetic template to produce fins originated, about 100 million years before paired fins evolved and about 200 million years before paired fins evolved into limbs, as per University of Florida genetics researchers. The findings, published online today in the journal Nature, also provide insight into the evolutionary history of genes involved in human birth defects.

"Given that paired fins made their evolutionary debut at a particular location on the sides of the body, intuitively one would think the genetic tools for fin development would be brought together in that place," said developmental biologist Martin Cohn, Ph.D., an associate professor with the UF departments of zoology and anatomy and cell biology and a member of the UF Genetics Institute. "We've discovered that the genetic circuitry for building limbs first appeared in an entirely different place - the midline of the animal".........

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