How Hammerhead Sharks Evolved

• Being a very strange species, scientists have always been curious over the origin of the hammerhead shark, and a new study shows that they actually evolved from much larger sharks, and the went through two more major evolutions.
• This shrinking in size is thought to be the effect of the early age at which hammerheads are able to reproduce, instead of trying to get more food to grow larger, they tried to reproduce more at young ages, resulting in a smaller species.
• Their trademark head shape was originally used by the large hammerheads to give a sort of lift underwater, the way a wing does, and although the small species does not get this same effect, they still benefit by being able to fit more electrical sensors in their noses, making prey detection much easier.
• Unfortunately, these sharks, which share similarities in growth stages as humans, are being hunted almost to extinction today.

Reflection:
Hammerhead sharks have always seemed interesting, but I have never really thought about how they came to be, so it is nice to have such a clear cut answer to an evolutionary question. The hammerheads also demonstrated how a vestigial trait, in this case their noses, can be later turned around and used as an advantage, only in a different way. What was the most curious though, was how the species grew smaller, despite the fact that a larger shark would have had more advantages. It almost seems like the species cared solely about reproducing and cared nothing for the actual fitness of its future offspring.

Source:
Staff, LiveScience. "How Hammerhead Sharks Evolved | LiveScience." LiveScience | Science, Technology, Health & Environmental News. 20 May 2010. Web. 21 May 2010. .

Weird wonders lived past the Cambrian

• A recent archaeological dig in Morocco has revealed a set of rare, soft-bodied organisms that almost never leave fossils, dating to the Early Ordovican Period, where previously they were thought only to exist in the Cambrian Period.
• The first trace of fossils like this was found at the Burgess Shale in Canada, but it was not nearly as large as this "treasure trove" of fossils containing creatures such as "halkieriids, which look like slugs wearing chain mail; Hallucigenia, which resemble long-legged centipedes with sea-urchin spines; and Opabina, which have five eyes and a long nose with a claw on the end."
• These surprising discoveries, occurring in what would have been open ocean during the Ordovican, have also revealed that horseshoe crabs have been around much longer than expected, actually first appearing around 30 million years ago.
• Morocco is a bit like a fossil capitol of the world due to the staggering amount of fossilized remains picked up there, often picked up and sold by ordinary farmers, and even the recently discovered fossils were unearthed by a small scale, local fossil collector named Mohammed Ben Said Ben Moula.

Reflection:
An article like this makes me think all the way back to the beginning of the year, when an in class video showed how different layers of the earth can reveal so much about evolutionary history. This at least gave me the background to understand how all of this took place. As far as the actual discovery, although not as ground-breaking as some of the others listed on this blog, it is nonetheless just as important, as it is, like I said in an earlier article, "another piece of the puzzle."

Source:
Jones, Nicola. "Weird Wonders Lived past the Cambrian: Scientific American." Science News, Articles and Information | Scientific American. 12 May 2010. Web. 21 May 2010. .

City Vs. Country Birds

• When biologists Fran Bonier and John Wingfield decided to delve into discovering differences between birds living in more urban and more natural environments, they discovered a very clear difference.
• Analyzing surveys sent out to bird enthusiasts all over the world, the team found that not only could city birds be found in a wider range of climates, but that they had developed quite a few adaptations along the way.
• Aside from being able to learn much more quickly than their country counterparts, city birds were found to be able to tolerate much higher hormonal stress levels, a likely reason that the birds managed to survive in such a, as some would say, "hospitable" environment.
• As John Wingfield says, the city birds "have a lot of flexibility in dealing with severe environments or environments that fluctuate widely."

Reflection:
This article immediately caused me to recall the peppered moth story, both having their similarities and differences. While both animals found themselves in a new man-made environment, the moths had to evolve to stay away from predators, while the birds, although having many predators removed by the presence of humans, also lost their food source. The one thing that I wondered about was why the city birds never ended up mating with the country birds and passing their useful traits down, helping the entirety of the bird population. Although the animals may not have the intelligence to directly affect their own evolutionary path, it seems like if it would happen naturally, the birds would just undergo natural selection and soon smart city birds would populate the countryside. On the other hand, if the city, in a sense, is also "evolving" than this could not happen, as the birds would need to be constantly under city influence to gain city traits.

Source:

Reed, Sunita. "City Vs. Country Birds." ScienCentral | Science Videos | Science News. 9 Apr. 2010. Web. 21 May 2010. .

EXTRA BREAKING NEWS: Researchers Create the World's First Fully Synthetic, Self-Replicating Living Cell

• Just today the J. Craig Venter institute announced that they have created "the first self-replicating species who's parent is a computer", a bacteria known as M. mycoides, whose fabrication came about through a process surprisingly dependent on yeast.
• After machines put together small chains of DNA, the snippets were implanted in yeast cells, whose enzymes are specifically geared toward repairing DNA, and the chains were snapped together.
• After repeating this process to create longer and longer chains until a full genome was created (with "watermark" DNA strands to mark the bacterium as synthetic), the entire string of DNA was implanted in a sort of "surrogate" bacterium, where the mycoides began to produce its own proteins that destroyed the surrogate proteins, creating a new bacterium made up entirely of the synthesized genes.
• Some scientists, however, are questioning whether or not this is truly synthetic life as although the DNA was completely sequenced by computer, the real creation only occurred in an existing cell, not to mention the obvious ethical issues surrounding the discovery.
• The company claims that their next project will be to create an algae capable of converting carbon dioxide into biofuel, which will require a genome chain twice as long.

Reflection:

I really must say, this article makes me absolutely ecstatic that the due date of the blogs was moved. Personally, this article is one of my favorites, and I believe that it is one of the turning points in scientific history. Just thinking about the multitude, no, the myriad of possibilities and implications that arrive from this breakthrough is just staggering. Naturally, our in depth coverage of protein synthesis and cell division greatly helped me understand the process used and I was quite surprise when I finished reading the article and though, "Wow, I actually understand what just happened." Although the author of the article notes that mammals are unlikely to be fabricated any time soon due to their immense combination of genomes, an upward of 3 billion genes, I believe that with the great rate at which science is accelerating, almost anything can become possible. Naturally, the completely human-orchestrated creation of life will definitely heat up the "should humans play God?" debate common in stem cells, but I doubt that anything will be able to stop this boulder of a discovery once it has started rolling.

Source:
Dillow, Clay. "Researchers Create the World's First Fully Synthetic, Self-Replicating Living Cell | Popular Science." Popular Science | New Technology, Science News, The Future Now. 20 May 2010. Web. 21 May 2010. .

Animal's Scary Snort is Blatant Lie Aimed at Getting Sex

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• The topi antelope, or Damaliscus lunatisi, gives off a very distinct snort when it spies predators, an evolutionary adaption allowing it to warn the rest of its pack of predatory presence.
• When females undergo ovulation, they often move quickly from mate to mate, often preventing some male topi from mating at all, but the males have begun to combat this by giving off a false "predator alert".
• This often causes the female to be put off guard and stay nearer to the male to protect herself, resulting in a second chance for the male to pass his genes on.
• During field tests where recordings of true and false male "warning call" was played out of a loudspeaker from a car window, scientists like Jakob Bro-Jørgensen found that the females were unable to distinguish between the two, despite the high frequency at which males pull of this trick.
• As Bro-Jørgensen said, "The lie is so blatant that it is quite amusing."

Reflection:

Naturally, I never would have picked this article before the sex unit, but now that I am reading, I realize that it really is a quite amazing study. After all, in class we have reviewed many means by which males attract mates, whether it be by beauty like the peacocks, or strength like chimpanzees, this is the first time I have ever really heard of an animal pulling a trick on the opposite gender. Of course, in the article they liken this behavior to humans, such as when a guy uses a scary movie to get his girlfriend to move towards him for security. Articles like this, where human and animal behavior is connected, have really made me start to see just how close humans are to animals. This also makes me start to see the worth in having so many articles, after all, this is a bit like one big puzzle, that we must piece together. If I had only read one or two articles for example, I would never have noticed all of the similarities that people share with the animal "ancestors".

Source:

Choi, Charles Q. "Animal's Scary Snort Is Blatant Lie Aimed at Getting Sex | LiveScience."LiveScience | Science, Technology, Health & Environmental News. 19 May 2010. Web. 20 May 2010. .

Solar Powered Sea Slugs Aid Climate Change

• Phyllodesmium Lizardensis is able to form a symiotic bond with the algae from the coral it eats.
• Among other things, this allows them to use the algae to recycle the sun's energy, or use the "stinging cells" in certain corals to defend themselves.
• The key to this surprising change is the ability of the nudibrachs (sea slugs) to incorporate into themselves the characteristics of tiny single celled plants, zooxanthellae, which also share a somewhat symbiotic bond with the corals.
• When tested, results showed that a sudden change in climate will leave the coral dead in a zooxanthellae-coral bond, but the zooxanthellae die in a zooxanthellae-nudibrach bond.

Reflection:
This is quite an interesting article in my opinion, despite the fact that much of it is scientific mumbo jumbo. It almost seems to me like these slugs are "cheating" evolution by not only benefiting from whatever ways natural selection shapes them, but being able to use the hard earned natural advantages of other organisms. It almost reminds me of humans, the way we can derive vaccines from bacteria to gain immunity, or cut the coat of an animal to gain its benefits. In fact, the more that on thinks about it, humans are really leeching from the entire world, taking whatever they need and adapting it for use by themselves. In essence, just like these corals.

Source:
Martlew, Marea. "Solar Powered Sea Slugs Aid Climate Change (Science Alert)." Science Alert: Australia & NZ Science News, Scholarships, Jobs, Events. Web. 19 May 2010. .

Viruses Store and Deliver Keys to Evolution

• Scientists like Forest Rowher, believe that virus' called phages can act as gene transporters for bacteria.
• With an estimated 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 phages on the earth, and the facts that antibodies kill bacteria but not viruses, and can switch environments very rapidly, it would make perfect sense for viruses to carry evolutionary advantages.
• By using a process called metagenomics, scientists found that the genetic profile of viruses and bacteria in different environments was very distinct.
• There are many times when viruses won't kill the bacteria they have infected, supporting this theory, and genes related to movement of bacteria have been found in viruses, suggesting that they can "control" instead of kill the bacteria during infection.
• Other viruses have been found to contain genes that allow the "consumption" of substances that bacteria cannot normally eat, unless the virus gives them the genes.

Reflection:
This story caught my eye because it presented a completely different viewpoint than that which I normally looked at viruses through. Before, I would have said, if anything, that viruses could only slow down evolution, because all they do is wipe out populations of cells very quickly. However, this article shows that despite the destructive nature, they can provide a collateral advantage instead of damage. along with some of the other articles I have read, this article makes it seem like almost anything can be bent to the will of humans. I would imagine that the next step of this discovery would be to give viruses certain genes and then inflict them upon bacteria to control the bacteria.

Source:
Bryner, Jeanna. "Viruses Store and Deliver Keys to Evolution - LiveScience- Msnbc.com." Breaking News, Weather, Business, Health, Entertainment, Sports, Politics, Travel, Science, Technology, Local, US & World News- Msnbc.com. Web. 19 May 2010. .