BIOL 1610 Spring 2018 Biology in the News

My article is from the Santa Fe Institute and I obtained it through biology news net.  The article was posted March 26th, 2018 and is titled “Caribou drone study shows enormous variation within heard.”  As a criminal justice major with a minor in biology I hope to work as a game warden after graduation dealing with poaching, fishing, and hunting laws.  As a result of my study interest I was drawn to this article dealing with the diversity between the same herd of caribou. This article follows the migration of the Dolphin-Union caribou from fall to spring.  These researchers used drones to follow these caribou across their migration and collect footage which they later analyzed and collected data from. They could see through the trajectories of each caribou how the social influence of each member affects their movements within heard patterns.  Through this they found enormous variation from individual to individual within the same heard. They also learned that...

Kayla Ivie Ketamine vs. Depression Ketamine is a anesthesia, which introduces a trance-like state while relieving pain and causing sedation and memory loss. But in recent clinical trials, there has been use of the drug in treating depression. Hailan Hu, a neuroscientist at Zhejiang University School of Medicine in Hangzhou, China, is a senior author on the new study. Hu has suspected that the drug is affecting the brain in the lateral habenula. These studies were used with mice and rats. Hu and the other scientists she worked with discovered that the Ketamine did affect that part of the brain. In the article it states that “a small proportion of the neurons in the lateral habenula fire several times in quick bursts, rather than firing once at regular intervals; the team found that “depressed” rodents had a lot more of these quick burst cells. In brain slices from normal rats, only about 7% of cells were the bursting type, but in rats bred to display depression-like behavior, the...

Over the last few years there has been lots of research done regarding stem cell research, to regenerate and fix damaged organs in the body. With the help of stem cell research there has been much discovered about the body in general which helps to advance the cause of medicine helping to finding cures and treatments for different diseases and disorders. To show some of the research I am writing this blog post on, “Targeted Repair of Heart Injury by Stem Cells Fused with Platelet Nanovesicles.”             I have chosen this paper because it illustrates different discoveries scientist have had while finding a way to potentially help stem cells to regenerate cardiac tissue following a myocardial infarction or a heart attack. Through the course of this paper, Junnan Tang and the other scientists he was working with talked about one of the hardest issues regarding cardiac stem cells which is the fact that they have a hard time impla...

Aaron Ashby Until it was recently discovered, it was the belief that there was only one species of giraffes. Which is easy to understand because they are large unique mammals that look really similar to one another. Scientists from Senckenberg and a giraffe conservation foundation have recently put time into studying the genetic makeup of giraffes, and have made the discovery that there are four different species of giraffes instead of one. For the longest time giraffes were classified as one species with nine different subspecies that underlie the main classification of giraffe. These subspecies were based on different characteristics of the giraffe, that is their coat pattern, horn structure, and where they are geographically. The most recent estimates of the giraffes population have shown that their numbers have gone down tremendously by 35% over the past 30 years. It was thought to be that this extinction was slowly occurring because people were hunting them down for their...