Pieris rapae is a chromatic white butterfly – to us, anyway. In the UV spectrum they have a number of bright colors on their upper wings but we can’t see them. Pterins, pigments on their wing scales, vary a lot among them and can be impacted by diet.

The brighter the male colors, the more desirable he is to females. Knowing that, researchers are able to study their mating behavior in the lab. But it doesn’t just involve any old females, they raised virgin ones in the lab. Butterfly research is a lot more interesting now, right?
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Regulatory DNA changes have made a huge impact on the evolution of human-specific traits.  A study in the latest issue of Nature covers not just the usual stuff, like what has been added in evolution to make us distinctly ‘human’, but rather what was lost.

We’re obviously different from animals and the researchers set out to find some molecular occurrences that are present in chimpanzees and other mammals but not in people – they found 583, which they call hCONDELs, 510 which were validated, mostly in nonfunctional DNA.  One instance sure to catch attention is deletion of a penile spine enhancer from the human androgen receptor (AR) gene, a  change correlated with a change in human anatomy –  namely loss of penile spines. 

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José Marian, the author of this paper about sperm injection, very kindly and promptly provided me with a copy. I began reading with an enthusiasm which only increased as I proceeded through the article. It’s short, clear, and tantalizing.

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Squid sex is both discreet and discrete.

Discreet, because usually the sexual organs remain hidden. The only visible activity looks more like a handshake than like intercourse, as the male uses one arm to pass sperm to the female.

Discrete, because the sperm comes in neat, quantized packages rather than free-flowing semen. These packages are called spermatophores, and they’re quite complex. In addition to a mass of sperm, they have a variety of tools for attaching themselves to the female’s body.

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Henry VIII, King of England and founder of the Anglican Church, was basically the Brad Pitt of his day when he was younger.   Charming, attractive and even kind, for a member of the Royal family. Yet he is most remembered for being gluttonous, impaired and executing wives.  
 
What happened?

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My husband has an enormous head. Sometimes this concerns me, when I consider the degree to which skull size may have a genetic basis and the fact that we’ll probably reproduce at some point. That has to fit through there? OW.

But maybe I should be grateful. I’ll certainly have an easier time of it than female Atlantic bobtail squid (Sepiola atlantica). These mamas, according to a recent study on their spawning behavior, can lay up to one and a half times their own body weight in eggs. That would be like me, at 125 pounds, producing 187.5 pounds of baby. WOW.

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Eek, sorry, I kinda disappeared for a few days. There was really good powder, what can I say?

I can at least draw a tenuous connection between driving up to the mountains and today’s blog topic! If you’ve ever tried to change altitude with a cold, you know how much trouble your sinuses can cause. These pockets of air in our heads have to equalize with the air pressure outside our heads, or else: PAIN.

Most of us just stick it out or pop some pseudoephedrine, but some people who suffer from recurring sinus infections require surgery to fix the condition. Unfortunately, the cure can be worse than the disease, in cases where surgery scars cause more sinus blockage and infections.

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Evolution has no moral compass.  We all know that.  And it has no guiding hand.  For that reason, says Christian de Duve, professor emeritus at the Catholic University of Louvain and Nobel laureate (Medicine or Physiology 1974), we may be doomed.

And to get his point across to all sides, he uses an Original Sin metaphor.   

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Among environmental activists and their supporters, the use of genetic modification is a bad thing.   Obviously, tomatoes would be the size of our thumbs if our ancestors did not genetically modify plants so research continues.   A group of researchers has announced that plants have for the first time been cloned as seeds, a major step toward making hybrid crop plants that can retain favorable traits from generation to generation – something to which even the most anti-science people can object.

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A curious tale! Not least because the writer has no compunctions about referring to squid as fish. While the group “fish” is by no means taxonomically rigorous, and comprises creatures as diverse as hagfish, sharks, and coealacanths, the one thing all fish have in common is that they’re vertebrates. Squid are squarely in the invertebrate camp, and therefore excluded from the fish club.

Linguistic quibbles aside, this really is strange:

EXPERTS have no answers on what has caused the death of thousands of squid in the River Derwent this week. Dead

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