Animal and Environmental Biology students newsletter

By Patience Asanga With help from the Japan Agency for Medical Research and development, some scientists have been able to throw light on the age-long debate of whether mammals, like some aquatic organisms, can breathe through their intestines. Some aquatic organisms like freshwater water catfish, loaches, and sea cucumbers use their lower intestines to breathe as a survival strategy in hypoxic (low oxygen supply) environments. The study headed by Takanori Takebe of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Centre/Tokyo Medical and Dental University, Yokohama City, Japan, reports that using enteral (intestinal) ventilation, some mammals like rodents and pigs can also respire with their intestines. To prove the effectiveness of enteral ventilation in supplying oxygen throughout the body of rodents and pigs, Takanori and his team designed and delivered two kinds of ventilation: intra-rectal oxygen gas ventilation and liquid ventilation with oxygenated perfluorocarbon (PFC) to their rodent a...

By Patience Asanga We’ve always known that the sperm’s role in reproduction is basically fertilisation of the female’s egg, but recent research published in the journal of Communication Biology indicates that the sperm might be more involved in reproduction than we think. In a study carried out on mice by a group of scientists from the Robinson Research Institute and Adelaide Medical School, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia, it was discovered that sperm plays a role in increasing the success of reproduction. In this study, the researchers analysed the uterus of female mice after mating with male mice that had undergone a vasectomy and those that were still intact. The result showed that the sperm does more than fertilising the egg, it also sends out signals that temper the female’s immune response to pregnancy. The head of the research team, Professor Sarah Robinson of the Robinson research institute , was quoted saying, “this [discovery] overturns our current understan...

By Patience Asanga If Bitcoin were a country, it would rank 50th in the world in terms of energy consumption Last month, a giant automobile company, Tesla, revoked the use of Bitcoin, the biggest cryptocurrency in circulation, for the purchase of its vehicles because of its impacts on the environment. In a tweet made by Tesla’s CEO, Elon Reeve Musk, using his verified Twitter handle, the company expressed its concern over the increasing use of coal for bitcoin mining and transactions. Coal is known to emit greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. Cryptocurrency is decentralized digital money that is based in a distributed database known as Blockchain. This database stores data across multiple computers but appears to the user as though it is a single site. Although blockchain technology is used in other industries like banking, medical science, during elections etc, it is more popular in the world of cryptocurrency. Blockchain is a method of keeping records in a way that can...