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Gone with the wind
to balloon off to pastures new. An animal that is perhaps less naturallyassociated with flight is the spider. Their eight-legged bodies can be a wide variety of shapes, from the round, spiny ‘jewel’ spiders of Australia (genus Gasteracantha) to the...
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Frozen assets
respond well to cryopreservation methods, having frozen sperm stocks means that if females can be induced to spawn fresh eggs it is technically possible to generate embryos. The establishment of a specialist gamete resource bank, alongside other...
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Crazy horses
required beforehand. The androgens also stimulate the male's mating behaviour. When it is time to mate, females deposit their eggs into a specialised brood pouch on the male's abdomen, which opens just before mating and is firmly closed afterwards. Once...
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'The iguana escaped and the monkey peed on me’
Fantastic (2013) My 2013 lectures were on the subject of developmental biology, the extraordinary complexities of life from egg to grave. It was a huge task, as in order to understand anything about development, you have to understand a lot about...
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From Organoids to Gastruloids
most important questions in biology relate to how we are formed and develop. For example, how is it that a single fertilised egg is able, in a relatively short space of time, to produce so many different cell types, tissues and organs, and position them...
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Scratching the surface
organisms. In the food industry, emulsifying and gelling agents often come from natural sources, such as soya lecithin and egg albumen, but even here there is some pressure to seek alternatives – either through the desire to make the final product...
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The Cell: A Visual Tour of the Building Block of Life
professional biologists. The exceptional photographs range from fossilised microalgae to the injection of DNA into an egg cell during the process of cloning a sheep. No branch of life is ignored – even the dog vomit slime mould is shown off in its full...
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Engineering with algae
has a much simpler outer structure. "In a few generations you have the original diatom form again. So we have a chicken and egg situation there. But we may be able to follow the morphological process as the auxospore progresses." While the exact...
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House spider survey
of weeks, mating with her repeatedly. The female then overwinters with stored sperm, and the next spring she can produce 10 egg sacs, each containing around 40 to 60 eggs. Don't kill those spiders you spot! Like most spiders, Tegenaria species subdue...
