clipped from www.thesun.co.uk

Unlucky Dunham had spent months being nursed back to health by carers after he
was found washed up on coastline in Florida.

Biologists at the Clearwater Aquarium, Florida, spent seven months treating
the stricken dolphin — before releasing him into the sea.

They watched on in horror as the predator mounted a stealth attack on the
mammal — tearing into the dolphin with its razor-sharp teeth.

clipped from www.sciencedaily.com

On Malaria Struggle, Baboons And Humans Have Similar Stories To Tell

ScienceDaily (June 24, 2009) — Evolutionarily speaking, baboons may be our more distant cousins among primates. But when it comes to our experiences with malaria over the course of time, it seems the stories of our two species have followed very similar plots.

“It’s a nice example of how – in the vastness of the genome – the same gene was modified in the same way in two different species to produce the same kind of resistance,” says Greg Wray, director of the IGSP’s Center for Evolutionary Genomics. “That’s a pretty remarkable thing when you think of all the different ways malaria resistance might have evolved.”

clipped from www.newsroom.ucla.edu

Close social ties make baboons better mothers, study finds

“If you’re a baboon, the strength of your mother’s relationship with other females is the best predictor of whether you’ll live to have children yourself,” said Joan Silk, the study’s lead author and a UCLA professor of anthropology. “The study adds to mounting evidence of the biological benefits of close relationships among females.”

The findings are significant because “survivorship to reproduction is the gold standard in evolutionary biology,” said co-author Dorothy Cheney, a professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania. “Females who raise offspring to a reproductive age are more likely see their genes pass along, so these findings demonstrate an evolutionary advantage to strong relationships with other females. In evolutionary terms, social moms are the fittest moms — at least when it comes to baboons.”

clipped from fresnobeehive.com

Egg bill pushed by unusual alliance

AB 1437, supported by the Humane Society of the United States, would prohibit the sale in California of out-of-state eggs produced by farms that don’t adhere to the California standard, which under Prop. 2 requires that certain farm animals have room to move freely.

The bill passed the Assembly Agriculture Committee recently on a unanimous vote, including “ayes” from Assembly members Tom Berryhill, R-Modesto, and Connie Conway, R-Tulare.

clipped from www.babelsdawn.com

Alfred Russel Wallace was the co-discoverer of natural selection. His paper provides a framework for thinking about how culture and environment constrain varieties to stay true to type and also how changes enable varieties to stray indefinitely from the original type.

It is now well established that language
cannot follow just any old rules. Linguists a few decades back thought there
was no limit to the variety of language, but research has since identified a
number of formal constraints that mark boundaries. Language can work within
those borders, but not cross them. The trouble with those borders is
understanding what these constraints mean psychologically and neurologically.
There must be some reason beyond the formal rules for why these constraints
existed. We hardly know how to think about these matters, let alone explain
them. A letter in the most recent issue of Nature reminds me, however,
that clues are coming in from, of all places, songbirds.

clipped from www.nytimes.com

Carole C. Noon, Who Founded Save the Chimps, Dies at 59

Dr. Carole C. Noon, a primatologist whose passion — and compassion — for her subjects led to her founding of Save the Chimps, the organization that provides the world’s largest sanctuary for captive chimpanzees, died Saturday in Fort Pierce, Fla. She was 59 and lived on the sanctuary grounds in Fort Pierce.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said her sister Lee Asbeck.

clipped from www.msnbc.msn.com

Bonobos rate food on scale from bark to grunt

Great apes yell out food ratings using at least five distinct vocalizations

Bonobos yell out their food ratings using at least five distinct vocalizations, the study found. Since the calls are tonally similar to certain other primate sounds, such as the human exclamations “Yum!” and “Ewww,” the scientists think there might be a somewhat universal primate language when it comes to food.

clipped from www.latimes.com

Portuguese water dogs play key role in genetics research

The Obama’s puppy comes from the most studied breed in the world. The clues into what determines size and disease susceptibility help researchers looking into human disease.

clipped from news.yahoo.com

Scientists start to unlock secrets of bird flight

WASHINGTON – For millennia, people have watched the birds and bees and wondered: “How do they do that?” Thanks to high-speed film and some persistent scientists, at least one of the secrets of flight is now revealed. When birds, bats or bugs make a turn, all they have to do is start flapping their wings normally again and they straighten right out.