Fruitful fruitflies in Crete

Fruitful insights

leeches and earthworms. It is not yet clear just how many of these are new discoveries, though the number is in the hundreds, but it is estimated that anywhere from one to nine million ocean species remain to be found, making this haul just the tip of the iceberg. The divers also placed little structures they refer to as doll's houses, but more formally known as Autonomous Reef Monitoring Syste...

The experimental evolution of aging in fruitflies.

The evolutionary theory of aging suggests that the level of repair will evolve to an intermediate optimum that permits the accumulation of random damage to cells. This, in turn, causes a decline in essential functions during the life span of an organism. The central claim of the life history theory of aging is that intrinsic mortality rates evolve in response to changes in extrinsic mortality r...

Fruitful design: the CDM

As the famous Rolling Stone’s song goes: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, well you might find, you get what you need”. What we want, and what we need are sometimes quite different things. In some ways, this may epitomize the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a market based mechanism that creates a way for developed countries and companies to offset...

A fruitful and gratifying collaboration.

How Fruitflies Know It's Time for Lunch

1512 normal enzyme. Then, they replaced the oxygen in question with a sulfur atom. The reaction didn’t work as well because, by the rules of chemistry, sulfur doesn’t like to bind to magnesium. But sulfur does like manganese and cadmium ions. So they replaced the magnesium with one of these other metal ions and measured the reaction. The researchers saw that these other metal ions restored (or ...