Good question right? If we’re so great and at the top of the foodchain because of how smart we are, why haven’t more animals evolved in the same way? Why are so many of them stupid and seemingly entirely reliant on instinct rather then learning things?

This is the question that Dr. Tadeusz Kawecki from the University of Fribourg tries to answer in his latest round of experiments. I’m afraid that, once again, i’m left with a newspaper article, from NY Times this time around, but they actually cite which journal it’s about to appear in and it seems like a fairly straightforward article, so we’ll run with it.

While i can of course recommend reading the entire article as it is pretty interesting, it is also 2 pages long and if you’re anything like me you have a short attention span (generation Y and all), so i’ll summarize it quickly. What they did was use flies, and performed selective breeding on the ones exhibiting a better ability to learn. The test was to let them taste two jellies of different colors, both with delicious smell to the fly, but one of them spiked with an icky taste. The flies that were later able display that they had learned from their experience and chose the color not containing the crappy taste, were kept and bred. They did this for 15 generations and the results were noticeable, the new breed of flies were much faster to learn then the original breed. Despite them being better learners though, they did not have the upper hand when it came to survival, showing that brawns may win over brains.

It is therefore clear that flies can evolve into smarter creatures fairly fast, but do not do so in nature as it is not beneficial for them. The doctor proposes that they reach an equilibrium of sorts between learning power and instincts. There were some other results in there as well, that suggested that in such simple creatures that the very act of learning could be destructive, and even proposed that this is something that should perhaps be looked into with humans as well (although that all seemed very speculative).

Well i don’t dare to try and explain much more of the article for fear of getting something wrong (i’m a physicist after all! Not a biologist), but that was the gist of it. Like i said, i can recommend reading it for yourself, it’s not very dry and i found it to be easy to grasp (the basics of it anyway).

I’m not much of a biologist, but this is worth a mention if you hadn’t already heard about it. 36 years ago Italian wall lizards were moved from their home on the South African island Pod Kopiste, over to the neighboring island of Pod Mrcaru. Now they can report that they have adapted remarkably to their new environment despite only staying for such a short time.

The lizards are said to have a striking difference in head shape and size, as well as increased biting strength and having formed new structures in their digestive tracts. The island they were originally on was well suited for hunting and eating insects, while the new island had an abundance of plant-life to feast on, causing the change in head-size. To quote the researchers:

As a result, individuals on Pod Mrcaru have heads that are longer, wider and taller than those on Pod Kopiste, which translates into a big increase in bite force. Because plants are tough and fibrous, high bite forces allow the lizards to crop smaller pieces from plants, which can help them break down the indigestible cell walls.

Like i said earlier, i’m not much of a biologist, but it seems to me that people that criticize evolution the most, usually say that all the evidence is circumstantial (fossils) and only small scale evolution is observed (bacterias evolving to become immune to antibiotics etc). But assuming all this holds up to scrutiny, it would appear to me that this is evidence for evolution that is not only close to impossible to deny (although i don’t doubt many will), but it is also something that is compelling and easy to understand.

Ok this is not really the kind of science news we usually report on, but seeing as how i’m a sucker for trashy day-time television, such as Maury’s talkshow where he routinely has episodes doing paternity tests on multiple guys, i thought i’d mention this. Apparently some would-be baby-daddy’s have been trying to cheat the system by a not-so-novel and fairly gross approach. It’s a variant of the good old “clean urine” technique utilized by athletes for decades, with a little twist.

When DNA tests are taken, they usually obtain a sample from the subject by using mouth-swab, and a DNA analysis is done on that sample and compared to another. In this particular case it’s a paternity test so it’s compared to some kids DNA where they can see the similarities if the kid has the guys genes. So the guy mentioned in this specific press release, got results back from the scientists that were pretty much impossible unless there were two different DNA’s in the sample they collected. When confronted with this he confessed, and it turns out he was carrying an extra bottle of saliva from one of his friends, and put that in his mouth right before the mouth-swab.

Science prevailed though and saw through it fairly easily, and although this has lead to a new procedure in paternity testing in hopes of avoiding similar situations, it would be almost impossible to sneak one past the laboratory using this method. They will of course keep trying to find new and innovative methods of cheating the tests (after all, murder trials hang on these things as well), and scientists will try to keep up and out-smart them. They go to quite some lengths to try and cheat it though, as you can also read about in the press-release, they’ve had similar problems before with DNA tests from blood-samples, where the subjects tried to get a blood transfusion shortly before their test in hopes of beating it.

A new vastly improved Noah’s Ark is being planed in the International Lunar Exploration Working Group as we speak, as searches for the Old One have all turned out empty.

The group wants to build the Ark under the surface of the Moon, with samples of DNA, embryos and information stored in several languages that will be activated in the case of a catastrophic event on Earth. It will on activation send the information to special receivers on Earth so possible survivors could rebuild the biological world to its former glory. (more…)

Turns out, an injection of some good’ol umbilical cord stem cells can do you some good. Maybe Tom Cruise was on to something when he said he’d eat his baby’s umbilical cord (not really, he’s batshit crazy).

Umbilical cords are often kept because they contain stem-cells that seem to be all the hype in medical research these days (and an oft brought up topic in politics). The controversy around stem-cells is that embryonic stem-cells must be extracted from … well embryos. But there are two types of stem-cells (roughly speaking), the embryonic stem-cells that can turn into any of the 220 cells in an adult body (and must be harvested from embryos), and adult stem-cells which can be found in umbilical cords (and in all adults really). Most research today is done on adult stem-cells, and in fact there are many medical treatments already in use today that use adult stem-cells. There is no approved medical procedure that involves embryonic stem-cells. A good starting point if you’re interested in knowing more, is the Wikipedia page for stem cells.