Animal and Environmental Biology students newsletter

By Jeffrey Akhuetiemhe As some conservationists and researchers begin to return large carnivores to areas where they once roamed, scientists intensify efforts to study the ecological roles of these predators in the wild, while keeping in mind that losing large predators could have disruptive effects on the ecosystem. However, ecologists seldom investigate whether those negative effects can be reversed by restoring these predators back to their natural homes. Take the case of capybaras in South America for example. It was theorized that the population of capybaras might fall after the arrival of their ferocious predator, jaguars, which is expected in a prey-predator relationship. Also, scientists predicted that the behaviour of this animal might change, radically, because of the arrival of their predator. Before their arrival, capybaras were fearless in their community, oftentimes, some were seen dozing off on walk paths. But once they realized there were predators lurking about, they b...

By Festus Iyenahie A brush with death led Hans Berger to invent the machine that could eavesdrop on the brain. In 1893, when he was 19, Berger fell off his horse during manoeuvres training with the German military and was nearly trampled. On that same day, his sister, far away, got a bad feeling about Hans. She talked her father into sending a telegram asking if everything was all right. To young Berger, this eerie timing was no coincidence: It was a case of “spontaneous telepathy,” he later wrote. Hans was convinced that he had transmitted his thoughts of mortal fear to his sister — somehow. So he decided to study psychiatry, beginning a quest to uncover how thoughts could travel between people. Chasing after a scientific basis for telepathy was a dead end, of course. But in the attempt, Berger ended up making a key contribution to modern medicine and science: He invented the electroencephalogram, or EEG, a device that could read the brain’s electrical activity. Berger’s machine, firs...

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...