What would we do without science

Hijacked from The Sailor at SteveAudio:

We're all related

To yeast:

Strangely, though, Dr. Marcotte did not discover the new genes in the human genome, nor in lab mice or even fruit flies. He and his colleagues found the genes in yeast.

“On the face of it, it’s just crazy,” Dr. Marcotte said. After all, these single-cell fungi don’t make blood vessels. They don’t even make blood. In yeast, it turns out, these five genes work together on a completely unrelated task: fixing cell walls.

Crazier still, Dr. Marcotte and his colleagues have discovered hundreds of other genes involved in human disorders by looking at distantly related species. They have found genes associated with deafness in plants, for example, and genes associated with breast cancer in nematode worms. The researchers reported their results recently in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The scientists took advantage of a peculiar feature of our evolutionary history. In our distant, amoeba-like ancestors, clusters of genes were already forming to work together on building cell walls and on other very basic tasks essential to life. Many of those genes still work together in those same clusters, over a billion years later, but on different tasks in different organisms.

Missing ladybugs

If you see one, get its name and address and then replace in the wild.

Across North America ladybug species distribution is changing. Over the past twenty years several native ladybugs that were once very common have become extremely rare. During this same time ladybugs from other places have greatly increased both their numbers and range. Some ladybugs are simply found in new places. This is happening very quickly and we don’t know how, or why, or what impact it will have on ladybug diversity or the role that ladybugs play in keeping plant-feeding insect populations low. We're asking you to join us in finding out where all the ladybugs have gone so we can try to prevent more native species from becoming so rare.

I'm just cooling my brain....

By yawning:

ALBANY, N.Y., July 4 The newest theory put forward about human yawning from the State University of New York at Albany claims it's because yawning cools the brain.

In the May issue of Evolutionary Psychology, a psychology professor and colleagues wrote that experiments showed volunteers yawned more often in situations in which their brains were likely to be warmer.

Volunteers were shown videos of people laughing, being neutral and yawning, and researchers counted how many times the volunteer responded with their own "contagious yawns," the New York Times reported Wednesday.

The volunteers were in three groups: some were instructed to breathe only through their noses, which is thought to cool the brain; a second group applied cold packs to their foreheads, also a cooler, and the third group applied hot packs to their foreheads.

"The two conditions thought to promote brain cooling practically eliminated contagious yawning," the researchers wrote.