Biology

Author: LadyofHats Mariana Ruiz

Author: Chabacano

Author: Wapcaplet

The gastrointestinal tract, also called the digestive tract, alimentary canal, or gut, is the system of organs within multicellular animals that takes in food, digests it to extract energy and nutrients, and expels the remaining waste.

To understand Jon’s obsession, it helps to start with a peculiar biological constraint — a cruel joke, as one scientist put it — at the heart of all life on Earth. It goes like this: All living organisms need the element nitrogen to survive. It’s a key part of proteins, DNA, and RNA. But while our atmosphere is absolutely packed with nitrogen, the one enzyme that can pull nitrogen from the air so that living organisms can actually use it basically falls apart in the presence of oxygen. So even though plants, animals, and fungi are constantly surrounded by nitrogen in the air, they can’t get a hold of it on their own. 

The respiratory system consists of the airways, the lungs, and the respiratory muscles that mediate the movement of air into and out of the body.

Interactive map: https://podbrushkin.github.io/col-tree-of-life.html

Neurons (also known as neurones and nerve cells) are electrically excitable cells in the nervous system that process and transmit information. In vertebrate animals, neurons are the core components of the brain, spinal cord and peripheral nerves.

Comments

Birds along elevation gradients serve as models for examining physiological adaptations, such as elevated hemoglobin concentrations at high altitudes due to lower oxygen availability. This study aimed to examine how various ecological traits influence the haemoglobin concentration responses of multiple bird taxa to an elevation gradient. This study aimed to examine how various ecological traits influence the haemoglobin concentration responses of multiple bird taxa to an elevation gradient.

A six-year project called “Elasmopower” examined how EMFs from subsea power cables in offshore wind farms affect bottom-dwelling sharks and rays. These species depend on natural electric and magnetic fields for key behaviors such as navigation, prey detection, habitat use and long-distance movement, particularly in low-visibility environments. The studies conducted as part of the Elasmopower project have been published in four papers, with three additional papers currently undergoing peer review.

Author: LadyofHats Mariana Ruiz

Our results demonstrate that magnetism is nearly ubiquitous across bees and that putative magnetoreception is not restricted to eusocial bee species or bees from a single taxonomic family. Instead, ferromagnetism was found in different bee species exhibiting a wide range of nesting and social behaviors, as well as cleptoparasitism, and in both males and females. Most (87.5%) of the bee species we assessed exhibited a discernable sigmoidal response indicating the presence of ferromagnetic particles, and most met the threshold for putative magnetoreception, based on values of MS and MS/m for S. quadripunctata for which magnetoreceptive behavior has been demonstrated (28, 55). Even beyond the bees, in the outgroups we assessed, we detected significant magnetism, including magnetoreceptive potential in solitary (Cerceris clypeata, Bembix sp., Lissonota sp., and Passaloecus sp.) and eusocial wasps (Polistes carolina), along with flies (Syrphidae).

Super old paper, but I’ve always noticed how the few videos on the subject sit the fence on whether they were semi- or fully aquatic and how there are very few illustrations of desmostylians and how many even depict them as semiaquatic. This paper argues they were “essentially or exclusively aquatic”, and it has multiple illustrations of different, proposed modes of life.

tværpostet fra: https://feddit.dk/post/20668023

10 of the world’s oldest dog breeds

They raid compost bins, outsmart latches and sometimes look gleeful doing it. A new UBC study in Animal Behaviour suggests raccoons may not just be opportunistic—they may be genuinely curious.

I was doing some research on mitochondrial DNA and and kept getting conflicting information on the entire orientation and direction of its circular structure. Some are clockwise oriented, some counter clockwise, some unify the L and H strand, some split them, some reverse the L and H strands.

Scientists in Brazil described a new-to-science species of poison dart frog last year. It was first found among the leaves of wild banana plants on a research expedition to the Juruá River Basin in the western Amazon in 2023.