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From the College of Natural Sciences
University of Texas at Austin Plant Geneticist Receives Fulbright Award
Z. Jeff Chen has been awarded a Fulbright scholarship to work at the University of Cambridge beginning January 2011.Too Many Sisters Affect Male Sexuality
AUSTIN, Texas--Growing up with lots of sisters makes a man less sexy. For rats, anyway. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that the sex ratio of a male rat’s family when he’s growing up influences both his own sexual behavior and how female rats respond to him. David Crews...
New Fossil Suggests Dinosaurs Not So Fierce After All
A new species of dinosaur discovered in Arizona suggests dinosaurs did not spread throughout the world by overpowering other species, but by taking advantage of a natural catastrophe that wiped out their competitors.
Humanizing Biodiversity
Dr. Sahotra Sarkar (Photo: Marsha Miller) Sahotra Sarkar’s quest to preserve earth’s biodiversity has found inspiration in a place that doesn’t usually play a starring role in the global environmental imagination—Texas. “The landowners here, who I’ve spent a lot of time working with, tend to care as much as most conservationists do that the land qu...
Captured in a Flash: The Insect Photos of John Abbott
Dr. John Abbott uses high speed flash photography to capture insects, bats and other animals in motion around Texas. The technique gives him (and you) the ability to see these creatures in a way that is impossible with the naked eye. Some of his subjects, like the phorid fly attacking the fire ants, are no larger than a pinhead. But with ...Stormwater Capacity of Vegetated Roofs Studied
The Austin City Council approved $10,000 to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center to study how much rainwater manufactured green roof products can capture.Seductive Frogs and Sexual Selection
In this video, we take a brief look at one of the ways that Darwin's theory of sexual selection plays out. Male túngara frogs, as biologist Mike Ryan has shown in pathbreaking experiments, can make themselves more attractive to females by making more complex calls. They also, as the video demonstrates, make themselves more vulnerable to the predati...On the Perilous Serenades of Túngara Frogs
Biologist Mike Ryan is being honored this month by the American Society of Naturalists with the E.O. Wilson Naturalist Award for his work in animal behavior.Biologist Searches for the Genetic Building Blocks of Social Behavior Across Species
For Hans Hofmann, the quest for the genetic building blocks of human behavior begins with a small fish.
Catching Evolution in Action
Natural fluorescence of Acropora millepora, viewed under a dissecting microscope. Photo: M. Matz and J. Wiedenmann. Our oceans are getting warmer and more acidic every year, and as a result, coral reefs are rapidly dying. Biologist Mikhail Matz has been carefully monitoring this decline, awaiting evolutionary developments that may signal bette...
Ants Hibernating in a Coat of Fungus
In this week’s installment of Raw Science, we link to recent papers in the fields of biochemistry, epigenetics, integrative biology, and human ecology. Ants Hibernating in a Coat of Fungus Biologists describe describe the peculiar fungus-coating behavior of the attine ant Mycetosoritis clorindae, where hibernating workers become enveloped in a l...
Darwin Stands Tall in Texas!
David Hillis and two other Texans were named 2010 "Friends of Darwin" by the National Center for Science Education for their decades of defending and promoting evolution. Read the full article.vvvvvvvCoastal Birds Decline on Mustang Island
Tony Amos’s almost daily bird counts over the years have revealed a troubling decline in 10 of the 28 most common species of Mustang Island’s coastal birds.Essay: Where the wild things were
We’re entering an age of vanishing wilderness, when the wild places were. To have any hope of preserving our biodiversity in the face of climate change, we need to be futurists, pragmatic but farsighted. It is time for radical notions. One such notion is to transplant species that otherwise have no hope.Read It Now
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