Dr Bernie Degnan and his team have been sequencing the genome of the simple sea sponge here at the University of Queensland and have made some pretty astonishing findings in regards to humans and stem cells:
CARLY LAIRD: For anyone who thought the cartoon character, SpongeBob SquarePants, was a bit far fetched, think again. Bernie Degnan is a professor of marine biology at the University of Queensland. He says although sea sponges certainly can’t talk and don’t have their own apartments under the sea, they are indeed clever marine animals.
BERNIE DEGNAN: Sponges just by their natural biology do things that we only wish we can engineer in a biomedical laboratory.
John Bruno mentioned this in passing at the bottom of his last post (Climate Literacy), but I thought this deserved a post of it’s own. Check out JB’s blog over at his lab website, bought to you live from the Galapagos Islands – shark surveys, coral monitoring, marine iguanas, seals on [...]
The 7000-year-old coral communities of Moreton Bay are telling a curious tale, expanding when sea-levels rise or water quality improves, then declining when current circulation becomes more restricted.
Intriguing new insights into the behaviour of corals and fish under changing climatic conditions will be presented by leading marine researchers at a public forum in [...]
With the advent of overfishing of the worlds oceans and climate change, jellyfish are slowly beginning to dominate oceanic ‘deadzones’ (see the ‘never-ending jellyfish joyride‘ for more details). Now, researchers are coming around to the idea that in such high numbers, jellyfish might just be able to stir up the oceans in a [...]
One of the most common climate change skeptic arguments against AGW is that short-term declines in globally averaged temperature completely refute arguments about the occurrence and causes of global warming. A new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters (Easterling and Wehner 2009) argues that short term periods of no-trend or even cooling (nested within longer term [...]
A study published in Nature Reports Climate Change on 11 June 2009 reports on the consequences of the emission targets being set by countries, including the US and Australia, in the lead-up to the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December.
Joeri Rogelj and colleagues conclude, “National targets give virtually no chance of [...]
Because it’s a slow Friday and this was a great read – check out the following piece by the ‘piquant’ Dr Milton Love (who really does exist – check out the ‘Love Lab‘ at the University of California) on why being a marine biologist really ain’t that great:
Reason Number Three: “I want [...]
CNN News, May 29th 2009:
Advances in the study of coral in the last few years has led a group of scientists to conclude that corals almost rival humans in their genetic complexity and their relationship to algae is key to their survival.
“We’ve known for some time the general functioning of [...]
A recent study published by Tom Oliver and Stephen Palumbi from Stanford University in the journal ‘Marine Ecology Progress Series‘ seems to suggest yet another miraculous and novel mechanism by which corals will ‘escape’ the pressures of global warming. In a nutshell, the researchers found that corals from ‘warm [...]
More than 400 leading scientists from nearly two-dozen countries have signed a consensus statement on the major threats facing the Pacific Ocean. The threats identified as the most serious and pervasive include overfishing, pollution, habitat destruction and climate change.
“This is first time the scientific community has come together in a single voice to express [...]
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