Life Sciences and Chemistry

’It’s a war inside a tree hole’

If you think your place is a dump, try living in a tree hole: a dark flooded crevice with years of accumulated decomposing leaves and bugs, infested with bacteria, other microbes, and crawling with insect larvae.

A biologist at Washington University in St. Louis has studied the ecosystem of the tree hole and the impact that three factors – predation, resources and disturbance — have on species diversity.

Jamie Kneite

A discovery by a University of California, San Diego biologist that some species of bees exploit chemical clues left by other bee species to guide their kin to food provides evidence that eavesdropping may be an evolutionary driving force behind some bees’ ability to conceal communication inside the hive, using a form of animal language to encode food location.

Bees can use two main forms of communication to tell their hive mates where to find food: abstract representations such as sounds o

A team led by University of California San Diego neurobiologists has developed a new approach to interpreting brain electroencephalograms, or EEGs, that provides an unprecedented view of thought in action and has the potential to advance our understanding of disorders like epilepsy and autism.

The new information processing and visualization methods that make it possible to follow activation in different areas of the brain dynamically are detailed in a paper featured on the cover of the June

Nearly 150 years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, biologists are still debating how new species emerge from old–and even the definition of species itself. Darwin demurred from offering a hard and fast definition, suggesting that such a thing was “undiscoverable.”

In this issue of PLoS Biology, Daniel Barbash and colleagues identify a true speciation gene in the fruitfly Drosophila.

One of the more enduring definitions characterizes organisms as distinct reproducti

Implications for tissue regeneration, birth defects and heart disease

In early development, how do cells know to put the right spacing between ribs, fingers and toes? How do they communicate with each other to form symmetrical and repeated patterns such as zebra stripes or leopard spots?

For the first time, UCLA researchers have recreated the ability of mammalian cells to self-organize, forming evenly spaced patterns in a test tube. Published in the June 22, 2004 issue of the

A new research study published in the June issue of Cancer Cell identifies the molecular events that contribute to a notoriously treatment-resistant form of T cell leukemia.

The findings reveal that disruption of immune cell differentiation is central to disease progression and provide new avenues for development of future therapeutics.

T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) accounts for 10%-15% of pediatric and 25% of adult ALL cases. A gene called TAL1/SCL is frequently act