People have always wondered how traits or characters are transmitted from parents to their offspring. (375)

A fossil discovered in Australia suggests that dinosaurs roaming Earth’s single supercontinent before the onset of Pangaean fragmentation, occupied a much larger geographical range than previously thought.
Paul Barrett at the Natural History Museum in London and his colleagues analysed a fossilized vertebra found in southern Australia and published the results in the recent issue of Biology letters. (357)

Researchers from the Australian Venom Research Unit (AVRU) at the University of Melbourne have collaborated with scientists from the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of Costa Rica, to develop new antivenom against the lethal Papuan taipan.
The preclinical studies of this antivenom have been published in the international journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.
Around 750 people are bitten in PNG each year. PhD candidate David Williams from AVRU, who coordinated the project in PNG, said snakebite is a neglected public health problem compounded by antivenom shortages, poor infrastructure and …

Palaeontologists have uncovered half-a-billion-year-old fossils demonstrating that primitive animals had excellent vision.
An international team led by scientists from the South Australian Museum and the University of Adelaide found the exquisite fossils, which look like squashed eyes from a recently swatted fly.
This discovery will be published tomorrow (Thursday 30 June 2011) in the prestigious journal Nature.
The lead author is Associate Professor Michael Lee from the South Australian Museum and the University of Adelaide’s School of Earth & Environmental Sciences.
Compound Eyes
Modern insects and crustaceans have “compound eyes” consisting of hundreds or even …

Following fertilization, the single celled embryo undergoes a number of mitotic divisions to produce a ball of cells called a blastula or blastoderm. Although these cells are all genetically identical, they gradually begin to express different gene products that reflect the regions of the adult body they will form. In my first lecture I discuss how these initial patterns of gene expression arise. In Drosophila, a maternally supplied transcription factor called Bicoid plays a particularly important role. Bcd RNA is anchored at the anterior end of the egg but is …

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