http://www.physorg.com/ en-us Physorg.com internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Natural history plans to chart life on earth, yet the discipline risks being buried under a landslide of painstakingly collected data that isn't always used. Now researchers at London's Natural History Museum have created a social networking tool called 'Scratchpads' where natural historians can get together and share their data. A paper on this new platform features in a supplement on biodiversity informatics published today in the open access journal, BMC Bioinformatics. http://www.physorg.com/news177055947.html Biology Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:15:04 EST news177055947 (AP) -- Running a museum is no picnic, but the Smithsonian is attracting ants anyway. http://www.physorg.com/news162822928.html Biology Fri, 29 May 2009 13:36:08 EST news162822928 (PhysOrg.com) -- A 47-million-year-old primate fossil, a purported "missing link" between primates and humans, was unveiled this week in New York. The fossil, formally called Darwinius masillae but nicknamed Ida, could, due to it being an essentially whole skeleton, shed light on the construction of the primate family tree, says an expert on primate evolution at Washington University in St. Louis. http://www.physorg.com/news161954864.html Other Sciences Tue, 19 May 2009 13:27:10 EST news161954864 (PhysOrg.com) -- A 380-million-year-old fossil fish that shows an unborn embryo and umbilical cord has been discovered, scientists report in the journal Nature. http://www.physorg.com/news154796016.html Biology Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:54:04 EST news154796016 (PhysOrg.com) -- A pregnant fossil fish at the Natural History Museum in London has shed light on the possible origin of sex, according to a study published in Nature today by an international team including Museum scientists. The fossil is an adult placoderm, an extinct group of armoured fish, and it contains a 5cm-long embryo. It is dated to the Upper Devonian period 350 million years ago and was found in the Gogo formation of western Australia. http://www.physorg.com/news154793593.html Biology Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:14:12 EST news154793593 A new and comprehensive analysis confirms that the evolutionary relationships among animals are not as simple as previously thought. The traditional idea that animal evolution has followed a trajectory from simple to complex -from sponge to chordate -meets a dramatic exception in the metazoan tree of life. New work suggests that the so-called "lower" metazoans (including Placozoa, corals, and jellyfish) evolved in parallel to "higher" animals (all other metazoans, from flatworms to chordates). It also appears that Placozoans -large amoeba-shaped, multi-cellular animals -have passed over sponges and other organisms as an animal that most closely mirrors the root of this tree of life. http://www.physorg.com/news152259480.html Biology Tue, 27 Jan 2009 06:18:25 EST news152259480 New molecular research shows that birds within the family Zosteropidae -named white eyes for the feathers that frame their eyes -form new species at a faster rate than any other known bird. Remarkably, unlike other rapid diversifications, which are generally confined in their geography, white eyes have managed to diversify across multiple continents and far-flung islands spanning much of the eastern hemisphere. The research was published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. http://www.physorg.com/news152212973.html Biology Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:23:26 EST news152212973 Modern microscopy technology has allowed two scorpion biologists, Carsten Kamenz of the Humboldt University in Berlin and Lorenzo Prendini of the American Museum of Natural History, to study and document what is nearly invisible. Looking at tiny morphological features like the sculpting of the hair-like outgrowths on lamellae -structures that fold like the leaves of a book and give the scorpion respiratory system its name, the book lung -Kamenz and Prendini found a wealth of new variation that gives insight into the evolutionary relationships among scorpions. Their research, recently published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, presents their raw data as an illustrated atlas of the book lungs of all major lineages of scorpions. http://www.physorg.com/news150984224.html Biology Mon, 12 Jan 2009 12:03:44 EST news150984224 You'd think that if scientists were to discover a new species, it would be in some remote, uncharted tropical forest, not a laboratory in New York. But a team from the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History has done the unexpected. Looking at the genes of the African dwarf crocodile, researchers found that the group -genetically speaking -comprises three distinct species rather than one. This not only ends a long debate about the taxonomy of this group, previously thought to consist of two closely related subspecies, but also defines a new, distinct species from genetic samples. http://www.physorg.com/news148316247.html Biology Fri, 12 Dec 2008 14:57:27 EST news148316247 It took less than a decade for native rats to become extinct on the Indian Ocean's previously uninhabited Christmas Island once Eurasian black rats jumped ship onto the island at the turn of the 20th century. But this story is more than the typical tale of direct competition: according to new genetic research published in PLoS One on November 5, black rats carried a pathogen that exterminated two endemic species, Rattus macleari and R. nativitatis. This study is the first to demonstrate extinction in a mammal because of disease, supporting the hypothesis proposed a decade ago that "hyperdisease conditions" -- unusually rapid mortality from which a species never recovers -can lead to extinction. http://www.physorg.com/news145088302.html Biology Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:18:22 EST news145088302 By comparing early dinosaurs to their closest competitors, the curuotarsans, Steve Brusatte of the American Museum of Natural History and colleagues have found that dinosaurs had no special ability to dominate the landscape for 160 million years. Curuotarsans looked better during the Triassic, having twice the disparity (or variation in body plans) and evolving at similar rates until rapid global warming spurred extinction of most groups (except crocodiles) while nearly all dinosaur groups survived. http://www.physorg.com/news140359371.html Other Sciences Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:42:51 EST news140359371