Nature has a shifty side. Bees cheat flowers. Flowers cheat bees. Fish cheat other fish, and so on. The more biologists look, the more skulduggery turns up.

In this sense, cheating means pretty much what it does among people, says evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers of VU University Amsterdam: One party exploits another, taking more than its fair share or happily reaping benefits without paying the costs. “There is always that one person that orders the most expensive meal on the menu and then insists on splitting the bill evenly,” Kiers says.

Diners in nature don’t always mind their manners, either. A bee that bites through a flower wall for a long, sweet drink of nectar but doesn’t reciprocate by moving pollen, for instance, has cheated the plant. Such nectar snatches violate an evolutionarily ancient arrangement of trading food for pollination.

No outraged tablemates crack down on freeloaders in the wild. Yet, Kiers says, “Nature has its own tools.” These safeguards help keep pollinators pollinating and many other vital, two-partner biological processes humming along.

Theorists have long predicted that such anti-exploitation measures would have evolved. Now a burst of studies are revealing how real organisms cope with cheating. Most dramatic are the lethal punishments enacted by otherwise harmless-looking partners. “Plants can be brutal,” Kiers notes. Other creatures deliver sanctions that aren’t so harsh, or instead switch partners when things don’t work out. And in some cases of natural larceny, the cheating amounts to an annoyance that is easier to live with than to fight.

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sciencenews.org 21 July 2010 http://sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/61138/title/Nature’s_recourse

Is sadness a sickness? It appears to spread like one, a new study has found.

Researchers at Harvard University and MIT wanted to see if a mathematical model developed to track and predict the spread of infectious diseases such as SARS and foot-and-mouth disease could also apply to the spread of happiness — and found that it worked.

They used data collected from 1,880 subjects in the Framingham Heart Study, a long-term research effort that has followed subjects since 1948 (and added some new ones along the way), giving them physical and emotional exams every two years. At each visit, subjects were classified as content, discontent or neutral. The researchers monitored how these emotional states changed over time and how these changes depended on the emotions of the people with whom the participants came into contact.

When the information was put into a traditional infectious-disease simulation, slightly modified to reflect the unique qualities of emotional spread rather than actual disease, the researchers found a correlation between an individual’s emotional state and those of the person’s contacts.

In other words, it appears that you can catch happiness. Or sadness. Moreover, the “recovery time” doesn’t depend on your contacts at all, which is a hallmark of diseases but surprising in an emotional context, since continuing contact with happy or sad people could be expected to affect one’s emotional state even after the initial “infection.”

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latimes.com 14 July 2010 http://www.latimes.com/news/health/la-heb-sadness-happiness-infectious-diseases-20100708,0,3088234.story

WASHINGTON, May 25, 2010 –— With the big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and growing concern about the global oil supply, the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) latest ChemMatters video podcast couldn’t have a timelier topic: Using food crops instead of petroleum to make plastics.

The high-definition video podcast, entitled “Plastics Go Green,” is based on an article about bioplastics featured in ChemMatters, the ACS’ award-winning high school chemistry magazine. It is available at www.bytesizescience.com and on the Bytesize Science podcast on iTunes.

Viewers can expect an entertaining and educational saga about an important facet of green chemistry. The episode explains how scientists are making plastics with sugar from corn, sugar cane or sugar beets as a substitute for oil. These natural, renewable crops make bioplastic production more environmentally friendly than traditional plastics manufacturing as well as save petroleum.

ChemMatters has been demystifying the chemistry in our everyday lives for more than 25 years. Released quarterly, each issue contains readable articles about the chemistry used in everyday life, and is of interest to high school students and their teachers.

portal.acs.org 4 June 2010 http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ARTICLEMAIN&node_id=222&content_id=CNBP_024971&use_sec=true&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=c627bed3-9c6d-4e8a-926f-bbde0c6839ee

YOUR plane crashes and you find yourself stranded in the middle of a vast jungle. How would you work out which fruits are safe to eat and where to find clean water? You could muddle along on your own for a while, but you would probably end up sick and very hungry. Far better to find some friendly locals and learn how they do things.

Learning from others is something we do all the time, not just in extremis. We are more reliant on so-called “social learning” than any other animal – it is thought to be at the core of culture and tradition and is credited with our successful colonisation of the planet. Yet no one knows exactly how social learning works. Obviously, copying others allows us to acquire useful knowledge without having to bear the costs of working everything out for ourselves. But there is a catch. If societies are to adapt to changing conditions, there must be innovation too – people cannot blindly copy everything because the information may be wrong, outdated or unavailable.

This problem has occupied Kevin Laland of the University of St Andrews, UK, for some time. “Individuals ought to be selective with respect to when they rely on social learning and from whom they learn,” he says. “Natural selection ought to have fashioned specific adaptive learning strategies.” But what are these strategies? If social learning is such a powerful force in our species’ success, surely we need to know when, where and why it happens. Yet previous attempts to answer these questions have only scratched the surface. Laland realised that if he was going to get anywhere he would have to come up with an original approach.

Until then, only a tiny fraction of the possible learning strategies had been investigated. The most thoroughly researched was the “conformist transmission model” – the idea that a person is more likely to copy traits that are common in the population than those that are rare. An alternative is “copy an expert”, which seems like a reasonable rule to follow when buying a new computer or shares on the stock market, for example. “Copy the most successful” also makes intuitive sense, although in our celebrity-oriented world there is a chance it might backfire – George Clooney may endorse a certain brand of coffee, but does he really know any more about beverages than the next person?

Click HERE to read full article.

Washington, May 5 (ANI): The existing diversity in some coral populations could make them more susceptible to extreme temperature disturbances – such as those predicted from climate warming, according to an international team of marine biologists.

The team demonstrated that natural selection acting on the species of algae living within corals might determine which partnerships will survive when confronted with extreme temperatures changes.

Corals form symbiotic relationships with photosynthetic algae in order to survive. The algae provide the corals with nutrients and energy, while the corals provide the algae with nutrients and a place to live.

Scientists said that this delicate symbiosis is sensitive to changes in the environment, and especially to changes in temperature.

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