Tag Archive | ecology
LabBook April 5, 2013
Scouring the English Channel for microbes, bird mummies and more in this week’s LabBook.
Modeling Ancient Ecosystems to Understand the Environmental Impact of Human Activity
When a giant asteroid struck the tip of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico at the end of the Cretaceous Period roughly 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs of North America were doomed no matter what. The impact almost certainly triggered a plant die-off that led to mass extinctions among animals big and small. Using statistical […]
LabBook June 22, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers. THIS […]
Recalculating a 40-Year-Old Ecology Riddle
By Rob Mitchum In 1972, a physicist named Robert May tried his hand at a different scientific discipline, publishing a simple formula that inflamed the field of ecology. Scientists studying the structure of natural ecosystems had long assumed that diversity was an inherently good thing — those ecosystems stocked with thousands of species were likely […]
The Helpful Pacifism of Bacterial Cheaters
Have you ever cheated on a test by glancing over at someone else’s work? Or relied on a fellow student to carry the load on a group project while you coast along with minimal effort? While few will admit to these forms of cheating, they have long been fixtures of the classroom. However, a lazy […]
The Race Between Climate Change and Evolution
The evidence for recent, accelerating global climate change is very strong, as it is for the role we humans have played in influencing our Earth’s weather. But for the most part, there have been few direct tests of how climate change could affect the organisms that inhabit our planet. Much of the evidence on this […]
Linkage 9/2: Counting Species, Ancient Drug Resistance, Sleep & Hypertension
Writing about science means looking up a lot of numbers. Trying to find a figure for the number of cells in the body or the protein-encoding genes in human DNA or patients diagnosed with ovarian cancer from 1980 through 1995 can eat up a lot of time and internet bandwidth. For some of these oft-cited […]
When Academia is a Family Business
There’s something quaint and charming about a family business, where multiple generations work shoulder to shoulder to keep an enterprise afloat. But when the business in question is academia and the salaries are paid by tax dollars, suddenly keeping it in the family carries the stink of nepotism. In the public universities of Italy, it’s […]
When the Predators are Away…
At the core of ecology is the perpetual battle between predators and their prey. The relationship typically works like a see-saw: when more predators come into an environment, the prey population drops, until the predators start going hungry and dying off, allowing the numbers of prey to rebound, and so on. Ecologists have observed these […]
