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    • Showing only topics in ~science with the tag "biology". Back to normal view / Search all groups

    7. New vaccine technology could protect from future viruses and variants

      Text 134 words
      The vaccine antigen technology, developed by the University of Cambridge and spin-out DIOSynVax in early 2020, provided protection against all known variants of SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes...

      The vaccine antigen technology, developed by the University of Cambridge and spin-out DIOSynVax in early 2020, provided protection against all known variants of SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID-19 – as well as other major coronaviruses, including those that caused the first SARS epidemic in 2002.

      The studies in mice, rabbits and guinea pigs [...] found that the vaccine candidate provided a strong immune response against a range of coronaviruses by targeting the parts of the virus that are required for replication.

      Professor Jonathan Heeney from Cambridge’s Department of Veterinary Medicine, who led the research, [said] “We wanted to come up with a vaccine that wouldn’t only protect against SARS-CoV-2, but all its relatives.”

      https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1002345

      https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-023-01094-2

      18 votes

    9. Brainless jellyfish demonstrate learning ability

      Text 792 words
      Veronique Greenwood In the dappled sunlit waters of Caribbean mangrove forests, tiny box jellyfish bob in and out of the shade. Box jellies are distinguished from true jellyfish in part by their...

      Veronique Greenwood

      In the dappled sunlit waters of Caribbean mangrove forests, tiny box jellyfish bob in and out of the shade. Box jellies are distinguished from true jellyfish in part by their complex visual system — the grape-size predators have 24 eyes. But like other jellyfish, they are brainless, controlling their cube-shaped bodies with a distributed network of neurons.


      tap/click to know more...

      That network, it turns out, is more sophisticated than you might assume. On Friday, researchers published a report in the journal Current Biology indicating that the box jellyfish species Tripedalia cystophora have the ability to learn. Because box jellyfish diverged from our part of the animal kingdom long ago, understanding their cognitive abilities could help scientists trace the evolution of learning.

      The tricky part about studying learning in box jellies was finding an everyday behavior that scientists could train the creatures to perform in the lab.

      • Roots of mangroves

      Anders Garm, a biologist at the University of Copenhagen and an author of the new paper, said his team decided to focus on a swift about-face that box jellies execute when they are about to hit a mangrove root. These roots rise through the water like black towers, while the water around them appears pale by comparison. But the contrast between the two can change from day to day, as silt clouds the water and makes it more difficult to tell how far away a root is. How do box jellies tell when they are getting too close?

      “The hypothesis was, they need to learn this,” Garm said. “When they come back to these habitats, they have to learn, how is today’s water quality? How is the contrast changing today?”

      • Setup

      In the lab, researchers produced images of alternating dark and light stripes, representing the mangrove roots and water, and used them to line the insides of buckets about six inches wide. When the stripes were a stark black and white, representing optimum water clarity, box jellies never got close to the bucket walls. With less contrast between the stripes, however, box jellies immediately began to run into them. This was the scientists’ chance to see if they would learn.

      After a handful of collisions, the box jellies changed their behavior. Less than eight minutes after arriving in the bucket, they were swimming 50% farther from the pattern on the walls, and they had nearly quadrupled the number of times they performed their about-face maneuver. They seemed to have made a connection between the stripes ahead of them and the sensation of collision.

      • “It’s amazing to see how fast they learn,”

      Going further, researchers removed visual neurons from the box jellyfish and studied them in a dish. The cells were shown striped images while receiving a small electrical pulse to represent collision. Within about five minutes, the cells started sending the signal that would cause a whole box jellyfish to turn around.

      “It’s amazing to see how fast they learn,” said Jan Bielecki, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Physiology at Kiel University in Germany, also an author of the paper.

      Researchers who were not involved in the study called the results a significant step forward in understanding the origins of learning. “This is only the third time that associative learning has been convincingly demonstrated in cnidarians,” a group that includes sea anemones, hydras and jellyfish, said Ken Cheng, a professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, who studies the animals. “And this is the coolest demonstration, replete with physiological data.”

      The results also suggest that box jellyfish possess some level of short-term memory, because they can change their behavior based on past experience, said Michael Abrams, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the neuroscience of jellyfish sleep. He wonders how long the box jellies remember what they’ve learned. If they are taken out of the tank for an hour and then returned to it, do they have to learn what to do all over again?

      Future work

      In future work, researchers hope to identify which specific cells control the box jellyfish’s ability to learn from experience. Garm and his colleagues are curious about the molecular changes that happen in these cells as the animals incorporate new information into their behavior.

      They wonder, too, whether the capacity to learn is universal among nerve cells, regardless of whether they are part of a brain. It might explain their peculiar persistence in the tree of life.

      “There are organ systems popping up and going away all the time,” Garm said. “But nervous systems — once they are there, they very rarely go away again.”

      Perhaps the ability to learn is one reason they are still here.

      Seattle Times - Link to the article

      9 votes

    31. Is it true that plants begin to consume oxygen around 45°C?

      Ask
      I used to work with a guy who had three PhD's. (two in Europe, one in the US). He had them in math, chemistry and biology. He said a few fairly outlandish things over the timeframe that I knew...

      I used to work with a guy who had three PhD's. (two in Europe, one in the US). He had them in math, chemistry and biology. He said a few fairly outlandish things over the timeframe that I knew him, but every one I ever dug into it turned out was basically accurate.

      One of the things he mentioned in passing, but which I haven't been able to confirm to my satisfaction is that when plants reach certain high temps, they start producing H2O2 instead of H2O. (around 45 Celcius)

      I've read a few papers that seem to indicate that part at least is true, but I've never found anything that says whether or not this puts plants into the 'consumer' column for oxygen.

      Anyone here able to point me to something that has this answer? or anyone here know the answer, even if it's not specifically been published yet?

      12 votes

    41. Gray whales in Baja California frequently interact with humans in a remarkable shift. They were known to fight back when harpooned, even damaging boats, earning the nickname "devil fish."

      Text 248 words
      https://www.businessinsider.com/gray-whales-or-devil-fish-friendly-to-humans-baffling-scientists-2023-7#:~:text=Gray%20whales%20were%20nicknamed%20'devil,humans%20pet%20them%2C%20baffling%20scienti...

      https://www.businessinsider.com/gray-whales-or-devil-fish-friendly-to-humans-baffling-scientists-2023-7#:~:text=Gray%20whales%20were%20nicknamed%20'devil,humans%20pet%20them%2C%20baffling%20scientists.&text=Gray%20whales%20were%20hunted%20to,the%2018th%20and%2019th%20centuries.

      Gray whales put up such a fight against whalers and their boats they earned the nickname "devil fish." Today, in the same places where the whales were hunted to the brink of extinction just decades ago, they swim right up to boats, enchanting and even befriending the people in them.

      One of those remarkable encounters was captured in March in the Ojo de Liebre, a lagoon in Mexico's Baja Peninsula. The video showed a gray whale right beside a boat, allowing the captain to pick whale lice off its head.

      Although some thought the whale was purposefully going to the captain for help with the whale lice — which are actually crustaceans, not insects — experts told Insider that's probably not the case.

      Still, the fact that the gray whales of the Baja lagoons interact with boats and humans at all baffles researchers.

      "This is what's so strange. They were hunted almost to extinction," Andrew Trites, director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit at the University of British Columbia, told Insider. "You would think being near a person in a boat is the last thing the few remaining gray whales would've ever done and they would've had this disposition to avoid them at all costs, the few that survived."

      (article continues)

      10 votes

    44. Specimens are deteriorating at the Florida State Collection of Arthropods; this neglect could interfere with research

      Text 294 words
      https://undark.org/2023/07/05/neglect-of-a-museums-collection-could-cause-scientific-setbacks/ IN A DUSTY ROOM in central Florida, countless millipedes, centipedes, and other creepy-crawlies sit...

      https://undark.org/2023/07/05/neglect-of-a-museums-collection-could-cause-scientific-setbacks/

      IN A DUSTY ROOM in central Florida, countless millipedes, centipedes, and other creepy-crawlies sit in specimen jars, rotting. The invertebrates are part of the Florida State Collection of Arthropods in Gainesville, which totals more than 12 million insects and other arthropod specimens, and are used by expert curators to identify pest species that threaten Florida’s native and agricultural plants.

      However, not all specimens at the facility are treated equally, according to two people who have seen the collection firsthand. They say non-insect samples, like shrimp and millipedes, that are stored in ethanol have been neglected to the point of being irreversibly damaged or lost completely.

      When it comes to how the FSCA stacks up with other collections she’s worked in, Ann Dunn, a former curatorial assistant, is blunt: “This is the worst I’ve ever seen.”

      Experts say the loss of such specimens — even uncharismatic ones such as centipedes — is a setback for science. Particularly invaluable are holotypes, which are the example specimens that determine the description for an entire species. In fact, the variety of holotypes a collection has is often more important than its size, since those specimens are actively used for research, said Ainsley Seago, an associate curator of invertebrate zoology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

      A paper published in March 2023 highlighted the importance of museum specimens more generally, for addressing urgent issues like climate change and wildlife conservation, with 73 of the world’s largest natural history museums estimating their total collections to exceed 1.1 billion specimens. “This global collection,” the authors write, “is the physical basis for our understanding of the natural world and our place in it.”

      9 votes