Words of science: petrichor

26 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by sedeer in Bacteria, Language, Words of Science

Tags

earth, etymology, geosmin, petrichor, Popular science, rain, scent, science, smell, Words of Science

Like many other fields, science has its own style of communication full of specific jargon and guided by unwritten rules. Most of the posts on this blog focus on breaching this barrier to the public’s understanding and appreciation of science. In this series, I’d like to take another approach by highlighting scientific words which have escaped the confines of jargon to reach a broader appeal because of their sound or their evocative power as metaphors. Today’s word is petrichor.
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Away for a few weeks

22 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by sedeer in Blog

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I’ll be travelling for the next three weeks. I’ll try to post during the trip, but probably less frequently than I have. If you’re a new reader, why not use the opportunity to go back through the archives and get caught up?

We still don’t know how birds navigate

17 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by sedeer in Birds

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

animals, biology, bird, migration, navigation, Popular science, science

Everyone knows that migrating birds are capable of incredible feats of navigation; for example, the Bar-tailed Godwit manages to navigate across the Pacific during its non-stop 11,000km flight from Alaska to New Zealand. Some birds use visual or olfactory cues to navigate, but many birds are able to sense the Earth’s magnetic field, an ability which is supposed to be underpinned by a group of iron-rich cells in the upper beak. However, a study just published in Nature has uncovered the true identity of these cells and shown that they’re probably not involved in sensing magnetism, re-opening the question of how birds can navigate across thousands of kilometers.
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Gut bacteria may cause diabetes

13 Friday Apr 2012

Posted by sedeer in Bacteria, Mammals

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

animals, biology, diabetes, Education, Health, Immune response, insulin, microbes, microbiome, Mouse, Popular science, science, TLR2

According to a recent study, your chances of developing adult onset diabetes may depend on what kind of bacteria are living in your gut. It’s been known for some time that type 2 diabetes can be caused by a combination of genetic and lifestyle factors; over the past few years, it’s become clear that these factors somehow interact with the microbiome, but the nature of this interaction and the microbiome’s role in determining susceptibility to diabetes hasn’t been properly explored. Last year a team of scientists from Brazil published results showing that changes in the community composition could completely reverse the effect of genetic factors.
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Natural selection: selfish genes & emergent properties

09 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by sedeer in Evolution, Natural Selection

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

altruism, biology, emergence, emergent properties, Gene, Gene-centered view of evolution, Group selection, macroevolution, Popular science, Richard Dawkins, science, selfish gene, Stephen Jay Gould

I briefly mentioned “gene centred views of evolution” in the final paragraph of my previous post in this series about natural selection. In this post, I’d like to expand a bit on the “selfish gene”, which has proven to be quite a powerful idea, and to present my thoughts on why it nevertheless provides an incomplete view of evolution. I know this can be a controversial subject, so feel free to chime in and start a discussion in the comments.

Earlier posts in this series: Modes of selection, Sexual selection, On fitness.

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Novel approach in plant breeding can recreate parental lines

02 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by sedeer in Genetics, Plants

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Agriculture, biology, breeding, Chromosome, farming, Heterosis, hybrid, hybrid vigor, Meiosis, Popular science, science, Seed

In a really neat piece of work based around a remarkably simple bit of engineering and some textbook genetics, a team of scientists has found a way to regenerate a plant’s parents through breeding — a technique they call “reverse breeding”. This clever bit of research, which is described in a paper appearing in Nature Genetics, should be applicable to a wide range of crop species, opening up the possibility of significant advances in crop improvement and breeding programmes.