Category: Biology

Here is a video nicely illustrating how they got their name.

You may have heard of the idea of a genetic bottleneck. It is when genetic variation is lost by sampling a very small subset of a population. Just by chance, the frequencies of alleles on the subset of the population will be different to those in the whole population, and overall genetic variation is likely to be lost by population sampling.

This is why small population sizes are not good, and species on conservation lists are required to not drop to too small population sizes. The limited genetic variation remaining in a small population poses a risk because it makes the species susceptible to whatever relies on genetic variation for adaptation, such as environmental changes or diseases.

Here is a visualisation of a bottleneck.

Here is a very scary video of bacteria evolving antibiotic resistance and growing in 1000x more antibiotic concentration than they could originally tolerate.

The Evolution of Bacteria on a "Mega-Plate" Petri Dish from Harvard Medical School on Vimeo.

Here is a nice talk on insects by a behavioural biologist.

Summary: Praying mantis with 3D glasses

Researchers in Newcastle have put 3D glasses on preying mantises to study their stereoscopic vision.

They seem to have it as they are fooled by 3D glasses the same was as humans do.

Here is a talk by one of the people involved in sequencing Neanderthal DNA.

Apart from an update on what we think about modern human populations, it is also an introduction on the sorts of analyses possible with modern genomics technology.

Such as the fact that we can reconstruct the genome of an extinct species from a part of a bone from the pinky.