Recent content by nipwoni

Alchemy was the precursor of chemistry, which was a mixture of magic, philosophy, mysticism, and science. It was more complex than turning base metals into gold. They had a lot of wrong ideas, but they got a lot right too, and laid the foundation for modern chemistry...

Still, it's likely that the skin color of people in that group would grow lighter over time (through natural selection), since this is what has happened to many different human groups when they moved to colder or less sunny climates. It would probably take a lot longer that a few hundred years...

I believe gemma are produced by the gametophyte generation (haploid) and combine to grow into diploid organisms, while spores are produced by the sporophyte generation (diploid) and grow into the gametophyte.

I also think all mutations are "faulty." Some of them just happen to have benficial effects.

Seems to me that cancer and evolution are related in a way. Cancer cells are better at surviving and reproducing than other cells, because they've escaped the body's controls on cell division. This allows them to increase their population much faster than other cells. They have adaptations to...

Simian immunodeficiency viruses are similar to HIV and infect many primate species. HIV probably arose from one of those and broke the species barrier at some point. The interesting thing is that most of these viruses don't cause disease in their hosts. This probably means that the virus and the...

I'm a 3rd year undergraduate in Plant Biology at Cornell. I love all areas of biology, but my favorites are systematics/evolution and plant chemistry.

They're not isomers either. C3 plants initially incorporate carbon into a 3-carbon molecule, while C4 plants incorporate it into a 4-carbon molecule. There are also many other anatomical and physiological differences between the two types of plants.

In plants, this actually happens sometimes. The offspring ends up triploid, so it sometimes dies, but triploid plants can survive sometimes. They just can't reproduce sexually because everything gets messed up in meiosis.

Polyploidy is actually very common in the plant kingdom. According to my genetics teacher, there are more polyploid plants than diploid ones. Plants with even ploidy numbers (4N, 6N, 8N etc.) are usually perfectly healthy and are often more vigorous and have larger fruits and flowers. Because of...

There have been numerous theories of evolution besides natural selection over the years. These include Mutationist evolution (which says that mutations are the driving force of evolution and there is no need for selection), Lamarckian evolution (the idea that organs a creature needs will develop...

If there were no bacteria or fungi present, would fruits get overripe by themselves? I know fruits are programmed to ripen by breaking down some of their carbohydrates, increasing the amount of simple sugars and making them taste sweet and smell good. Maybe this process continues until they're...

The purpose of these chemicals for many plants is to protect themselves from being eaten, either by killing predators, making them sick so they avoid that plant in the future, or distracting them so that food is the last thing on their minds. Many plants don't need any preparation and can take...

Here's the article http://www1.umn.edu/arspsru/research/oat.html

Many plants hybridize in nature easily, and even ones that don't can often be hybridized by humans without genetic engineering. Sometimes even plants in different genera can interbreed. Also, someone managed to artificially cross corn with oats. These are in the same family (grasses) but are...