The Invasion Of The Black Tiger Shrimp

This black tiger shrimp was caught in 210 feet of water off the coast of Louisiana.

Scientists: Giant Cannibal Shrimp Invasion Growing -- CNN

An invasion of giant cannibal shrimp into America's coastal waters appears to be getting worse.

Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Thursday that sightings of the massive Asian tiger shrimp, which can eat their smaller cousins, were 10 times higher in 2011 than in 2010.

“And they are probably even more prevalent than reports suggest, because the more fisherman and other locals become accustomed to seeing them, the less likely they are to report them,” said Pam Fuller, a USGS biologist.

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My Comment: Talk about jumbo shrimp.

Claim Of Arsenic-Based Life Reignites Debate

This scanning electron micrograph shows a strain of the arsenic-eating bacterium called GFAJ-1. CREDIT: Science/AAAS.

Debate Reignited Over Claim of Arsenic-Based Life -- Live Science

One of the more heated scientific debates of recent years has been stirred up again with the publication of new criticisms of the reported finding of "arsenic life."

The prestigious journal Science published the criticisms today (May 27) along with a defense of the study, which Science had posted online this past December.

A team of researchers led by Felisa Wolfe-Simon of NASA's Astrobiology Institute had studied bacteria collected from California's Mono Lake and reported finding evidence that these microorganisms were substituting the poisonous molecule arsenic for the phosphorous usually used to build DNA.

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New Species 'Live Without Oxygen'

One of the species has been named Spinoloricus Cinzia, after Dr Danovaro's wife

From The Telegraph:

Three species of creature, which are only a millimetre long and resemble jellyfish encased in shells, were found 2.2 miles (3.5km) underwater on the ocean floor, 124 miles (200km) off the coast of Crete, in an area with almost no oxygen.

The animals, named Loriciferans due to their protective layer, or lorica, were discovered by a team led by Roberto Danovaro from Marche Polytechnic University in Ancona, Italy.

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Biology May Not Be So Complex After All, Physicist Finds

Image: Effects of parameter variation on escape time distribution for the gKPR process. (A) Mean completion time versus ¸ and Æ for L=8. (B) Coefficient of variation CV2gKPR versus ¸ and Æ for L=8. (C,D) the same for L=16. (Credit: Image courtesy of Emory University)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 19, 2010) — Centuries ago, scientists began reducing the physics of the universe into a few, key laws described by a handful of parameters. Such simple descriptions have remained elusive for complex biological systems -- until now.

Emory biophysicist Ilya Nemenman has identified parameters for several biochemical networks that distill the entire behavior of these systems into simple equivalent dynamics. The discovery may hold the potential to streamline the development of drugs and diagnostic tools, by simplifying the research models.

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Bacteria Rule Our Bodies, Our Planet

Image: The human gut is a virtual zoo, full of a wide variety of bacteria, a new study found. And scientists say that's a good thing. The first results of an international effort to catalog the millions of non-human genes inside people found about 170 different bacteria species thriving in the average person's digestive tract. (CBS/AP)

From CBS News:

Scientists Say the Human Gut is Full of Bacteria; Yes, That's a Good Thing.

(AP) The human gut is a virtual zoo, full of a wide variety of bacteria, a new study found. And scientists say that's a good thing.

The first results of an international effort to catalog the millions of non-human genes inside people found about 170 different bacteria species thriving in the average person's digestive tract. The study also found that people with inflammatory bowel disease had fewer distinct species inside the gut.

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Dirty Tricks Of The Egg And Sperm Race

In many mammals the entire sperm enters the egg, bringing proteins that may influence development (Image: Thierry Berrod/Mona Lisa Production/SPL)

From New Scientist:

EVEN the most romantic evolutionary biologist knows that sexual reproduction is rarely a harmonious affair. Among most higher animals it is often predicated on fierce fighting, showy one-upmanship, exploitation and deception. Charles Darwin himself drew the battle lines, when he set out his ideas on sexual selection to explain the evolution of traits that provide mating advantages - either through contests between members of the same sex or by increasing attractiveness to the opposite sex. Much of what Darwin said still guides our thinking. However, since the mid-19th century it has become clear that there is more to successful reproduction than mere copulation.

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By Tracking Water Molecules, Physicists Hope To Unlock Secrets Of Life

Supercool. As individual water molecules fluctuate, breaking and forming bonds with their nearest neighbors, the result is slightly imperfect tetrahedral structures that are constantly in flux. Research suggests that these fluctuations give rise to some of water's most unusual and life-sustaining features. (Credit: Image courtesy of Rockefeller University)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Mar. 1, 2010) — The key to life as we know it is water, a tiny molecule with some highly unusual properties, such as the ability to retain large amounts of heat and to lose, instead of gain, density as it solidifies. It behaves so differently from other liquids, in fact, that by some measures it shouldn't even exist. Now scientists have made a batch of new discoveries about the ubiquitous liquid, suggesting that an individual water molecule's interactions with its neighbors could someday be manipulated to solve some of the world's thorniest problems -- from agriculture to cancer.

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Life From A Test Tube? The Real Promise Of Synthetic Biology

Image: Matt Collins

From Scientific American:

Scientists are closing in on the ability to make life from scratch, with potential consequences both good and bad.

I have seen the future, and it is now.

Those words came to mind again as I recently listened to Craig Venter, one of those leading the new areas of synthetic genomics and synthetic biology. Every time I hear a talk on this subject, it seems a new threshold in the artificial manipulation and, ultimately, creation of life has been passed.

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No (Primordial) Soup For You: Origins Of Life Were Not What You Think

From Discovery News:

The predominant theory of the origin of life would make a terrific setting for a space horror movie, or a particularly tense episode of Star Trek: picture early Earth, a noxious place devoid of oxygen, its young oceans choked with some kind of indiscernible ooze.

Depending on how you like your origin stories, a thunderstorm passes overhead, and lightning crackles into the broth, pouring forth ever bigger organic molecules until -- presto! -- virus-sized strands of RNA and the first replicating life is formed.

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Fruit Flies Are Alcoholics Too

Fruit flies too can suffer from alcohol addiction.

From Cosmos:

SYDNEY: Given the chance, fruit flies will consume alcohol until they are intoxicated and enjoy it more and more over time, much like a human alcoholic, a new study has found.

In the study, published in the journal Current Biology, the fruit flies were given a choice between food containing 15% ethanol, and regular, ethanol-free food over a five-day period.

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The Sea Change That's Challenging Biology's Central Dogma

Image: National Institute of General Medical Sciences

From Discover Magazine:

For decades, RNA was seen as a simple slave to DNA. Newer research shows it has an active and critical role in every disease from Alzheimer's to cancer.

One of the great revolutions in modern science rests on the elongated backside of a grotesque, mutant worm. Inexpensive and easy to manipulate in the lab, Caenorhabditis elegans develops from egg to adult in three days and produces a few hundred offspring three days after that. Virtually all of the worms are hermaphrodites, containing both male and female sex organs and capable of making sperm and eggs, so each creature can fertilize itself. And because the worm is transparent and the adult has only 959 cells, development of every stage from egg to adult can be observed under the microscope and documented with near perfect detail while the worm is alive, an achievement accomplished in the 1970s by Sidney Brenner, a University of Cambridge researcher and legend in the field.

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A Life Of Its Own: Where Will Synthetic Biology Lead Us?

Image: If the science truly succeeds, it will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us.

From The New Yorker:

The first time Jay Keasling remembers hearing the word “artemisinin,” about a decade ago, he had no idea what it meant. “Not a clue,” Keasling, a professor of biochemical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, recalled. Although artemisinin has become the world’s most important malaria medicine, Keasling wasn’t an expert on infectious diseases. But he happened to be in the process of creating a new discipline, synthetic biology, which—by combining elements of engineering, chemistry, computer science, and molecular biology—seeks to assemble the biological tools necessary to redesign the living world.

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Newly Discovered Iron-Breathing Species Have Lived In Cold Isolation For Millions Of Years

A cross-section of Blood Falls showing how micorbial communities survive. (Credit: Zina Deretsky / NSF)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 17, 2009) — A reservoir of briny liquid buried deep beneath an Antarctic glacier supports hardy microbes that have lived in isolation for millions of years, researchers report April 17 in the journal Science.

The discovery of life in a place where cold, darkness, and lack of oxygen would previously have led scientists to believe nothing could survive comes from a team led by researchers at Harvard University and Dartmouth College. Their work was funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA, and Harvard's Microbial Sciences Initiative.

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Mysterious Microbe May Play Important Role In Ocean Ecology

These unidentified cyanobacteria were collected in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii. (Credit: Photo by Rachel Foster)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 15, 2008) — An unusual microorganism discovered in the open ocean may force scientists to rethink their understanding of how carbon and nitrogen cycle through ocean ecosystems. A research team led by Jonathan Zehr, professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, characterized the new microbe by analyzing its genetic material, even though researchers have not been able to grow it in the laboratory.

Zehr said the newly described organism seems to be an atypical member of the cyanobacteria, a group of photosynthetic bacteria formerly known as blue-green algae. Unlike all other known free-living cyanobacteria, this one lacks some of the genes needed to carry out photosynthesis, the process by which plants use light energy to make sugars out of carbon dioxide and water.

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Bacteria On The Move, Eating Their Fill

The rippling pattern of a swarm of M. xanthus moving over their prey. John R. Kirby/University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine

From The New York Times:

Bacteria move in mysterious ways. Myxococcus xanthus, for example, a harmless soil microbe, forms rippling swarms by the millions as it devours other microbes as prey.

This organized back-and-forth behavior “was thought to occur particularly in response to starvation,” said John R. Kirby, a microbiologist at the University of Iowa. But Dr. Kirby, James E. Berleman and others at Iowa report in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that M. xanthus acts this way in response to food, and uses chemical sensing and signaling pathways to do so.

Directed bacterial movement that is controlled in this way is known as chemotaxis, and has been observed in individual microbes as well as in colonies that organize into biofilms or other structures. Because M. xanthus uses chemotaxis-like pathways to move over its prey, the researchers call this behavior predataxis. (A video is at nytimes.com/science.)

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The Biological Clock's Incredible Influence Revealed

James Griffith, coordinator of Jonathan Arnold's lab, goes over data from the clock project. Credit: Andrew Tucker, University of Georgia

From Live Science:

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

It’s a sunny Thursday morning and two accomplished scientists are seated on either side of a non-descript table in a University of Georgia conference room talking about bread mold.

Bread mold? Nobody uses that term around here, though. In the lab, it’s Neurospora crassa. (Because of its long striations, the growing mold looks like a nerve system, so Neurospora literally means “nerve spore.”) Jonathan Arnold, a geneticist and Heinz-Bernd Schuttler, a computational physicist, are not explaining something as plebian as bread mold, though. They’re talking about biological clocks, those internal tickers that, among other things, tell all living things when to rest and when to awaken.

For years, researchers thought that the function of these clocks was relatively straightforward. Now, a new NSF-supported research thrust by the two scientists and their colleagues is showing that the number of genes in Neurospora under the control of the biological clock is dramatically higher than anyone ever suspected.

“We’re just now beginning to see why the clock is so far-reaching in effects on the organism,” says Arnold, whose excitement when discussing his latest work is palpable. The clock’s off-on abilities don’t just intrigue geneticists, either.

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New Life Found in Old Tombs

From Live Science:

Talk about secrets of the crypt: Two newly discovered species of bacteria have been found on the walls of ancient Roman tombs.

Bacteria often grow on the walls of underground tombs, causing decay and damaging these archaeological sites. Scientists in Italy found the two new microbes while studying decayed surfaces in the Catacombs of Saint Callistus in Rome.

The Catacombs of Saint Callistus are part of a massive underground graveyard that covers 37 acres. The tombs, named after Pope Saint Callistus I, were built at the end of the second century. More than 30 popes and martyrs are buried in the catacombs.

The new bacteria, part of the Kribbella genus first discovered in 1999, were isolated from whitish-gray patinas, or coatings, on surfaces in the catacombs. They have been named Kribbella catacumbae and Kribbella sancticallisti.

The discovery is detailed in the September issue of the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Mircobiology.

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A Biological Clock for Dads Too

From Time Magazine:

Turns out women aren't the only ones with an expiration date on their fertility. An emerging body of research is showing that men, too, have a "biological clock."

Not only do men become less fecund as they age, but their fertility begins to decline relatively early — around age 24, six years or so before women's. Historically, infertility has been seen as a female issue, as has the increased risk of Down syndrome and other birth defects, but studies now also link higher rates of autism, schizophrenia and Down syndrome in children born to older fathers. A recent paper by researchers at Sweden's Karolinska Institute found that the risk of bipolar disorder in children increased with paternal age, particularly in children born to men age 55 or older.

It used to be that "if you had hair on your chest, it was your wife's problem," says Barry Behr, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Stanford Medical School and director of Stanford's in vitro fertilization laboratory. Even now, he said, though about half of infertility cases are caused by male factors, such as low sperm count or motility, there are many more tests to evaluate a woman's fertility than a man's.

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