Wednesday, 23 May, 2012

While wandering on the beach recently, those of us at The Why Files got a little bugged out by the sight of a line, roughly a foot wide and stretching for miles down the sand, of Asian Lady Beetles-a ladybug-like insect originally imported from Asia as a biological tool for pest control. After blushing at [...]

This composite image of a fruit fly embryo at a very early stage of development helps tell scientists how genes govern an animal’s body plan. Using a confocal microscope and three fluorescently-labeled gene products — one red, one blue and one green — biologists can observe cells as they are told by such genes which [...]

Grab the Crayolas: To color summer in the Southern Hemisphere, you’ll need more than blue gray and vivid violet. Think green, and lots of it. As this satellite image of the South American coast shows, warm southern waters are a haven for phytoplankton. The tiny marine plants grow like mad during long, warm summer days. [...]

This CSI is a jellyfish. Not really a fish at all, this invertebrate is a relative to corals and sea anemones. Composed of over 95 percent water, the jelly has no head, brain, heart, eyes, ears, or bones. But the jelly is not just a glob of gelatinous goo. It has a net of tentacles [...]

Here at The Why Files, we’re always glued to our computers, but it turns out that an even more powerful glue than cyberspace may be on the horizon. The Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) in conjunction with researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara are working on a glue with real muscle; [...]

Because of their large numbers and biological dominance, ants are among the most legendary of animals. Although a single ant, like this brown ant, is less than one-millionth the size of a human, collectively they rival people as the dominant organisms of the land, according to famed myrmecologist E. O. Wilson. A conservative estimate of [...]

This pink beauty has all the splendor a rose in bloom, but in fact it’s a fungus, and a deadly one at that. Basidiocarps, like the fan-shaped structure on this inch-wide Crinipellis perniciosa mushroom, are the spore- bearing structures of fungi. Spores serve the same role in the fungal life cycle that seeds do in [...]

This way cool image is a cross section of the developing compound eye of a Drosophila melonogaster, a fruit fly that is the workhorse of modern genetics and developmental biology. Using a laser-scanning confocal microscope, biologists can home in on early events in development. They are able to see, as we can here, how specific [...]

Actually, Methuselah would be a snot-nosed kid compared to this chain of bacterial cells. The image above is of a short chain of fossil cyanobacterial cells that were extracted from Bitter Springs chert of northern Australia. They are an estimated 1 billion years old. It may seem shocking that bacteria and other microbes can leave [...]

If he had lived to see it, Gregor Mendel, the 19th century Austrian monk and botanist who founded the discipline of genetics, might have found this picture to be as cool as we think it is. The slender blue filament that snakes its way across this picture is the DNA of a pea plant. Taken [...]