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Despite what you might think, evolution rarely happens because something is good for a species. Instead, natural selection favours genetic variants that are good for the individuals that possess them. This leads to a much ...
Bacteria were the original masters of their domain, having the Earth to themselves for the majority of their existence, filling every environmental niche, nook and cranny, from mountain peaks to the thermal vents at the ocean's ...
By charting the slopes and crags on animals' teeth as if they were mountain ranges, scientists at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History have created a powerful new way to learn about the diets of extinct animals ...
Adapt or die. That's the reality for an animal species when it is faced with a harsh environment. Until now, many scientists have assumed that the more challenging an animal's environment, the greater the pressure to adapt ...
Among flowering plants, the rose family (called Rosaceae) displays an incredible diversity, including classic reds like the American beauty. But in addition to ornamentals making the perfect romantic gift, the Rosaceae family ...
A joint team of geneticists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, demonstrated that the emergence of mammary glands in placental mammals and marsupials ...
It's often said that through our innovations in science, agriculture and medicine humans have become masters of our biological destiny.
The evolutionary secrets of an extraordinary North American rodent are being uncovered by University of Queensland School of Biological Sciences researchers.
Showy ornaments used by the male of the species in competition for mates, such as the long tail of a peacock or shaggy mane of a lion, could indicate a species' risk of decline in a changing climate, according to a new study ...
Decay is a complex process in which organisms use a repertoire of enzymes to slowly exploit and ultimately digest their hosts. Fungi are master decayers of dead plant matter, including wood. So-called white rot fungi have ...
Lake Lanier in Georgia is the primary water reservoir serving suburban and metropolitan Atlanta. When the lake's water level drops below a certain point, calls go out for water conservation and news reports show images of ...
A new study led by scientists at the University of Oxford has found that small DNA molecules known as plasmids are one of the key culprits in spreading the major global health threat of antibiotic resistance.
Today's turtles don't have teeth; they cut off their food using hard ridges on their jaws. But their ancestors were not so dentally challenged. A team of international researchers including Dr. Márton Rabi from the Biogeology ...
From a geographical point of view, the Caucasus is far from an island or even a peninsula, being a relatively big mountainous region appearing as a fence at the border of Europe and Asia, situated between the Black and the ...
Protein pairs that control stimulus response in bacteria maintain a sensitive balance between interaction specificity and promiscuity, according to Rice University scientists.
Paul Kammerer committed suicide in 1926 after being accused of fraud in his famous experiments of "inheritance of acquired traits" with the midwife toad. A new study shows how recent advances in molecular epigenetics and ...
Years of research on the evolution of ancient life including the dinosaurs have been questioned after a fatal flaw in the way fossil data is analysed was exposed.
Purdue scientists got a glimpse into more than 450 million years of evolution by tracing the function of a hormone pathway that has been passed along and co-opted by new species since the first plants came onto land.
Biologists have been contemplating evolutionary change since Charles Darwin first explained it.
In research published in Science, a Stanford-led international team used a new analytic technique to map recent evolution. The technique relies exclusively on the DNA sequences of modern humans, yet it can reveal rapid ...
Humans may live longer and longer, but eventually we all grow old and die. This leads to a simple question: is there an intrinsic maximum limit to human lifespan or not? There are two equally simple answers. Either there ...
Have you ever wondered why our hands have exactly five fingers? Dr. Marie Kmita's team certainly has. The researchers at the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal and Université de Montréal have uncovered a part ...
Corals first appeared on earth nearly half a billion years ago during the Cambrian Period of the Paleozoic Era. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle categorized corals as zoophyta, or "plant-animals", due to their plant-like ...
Animals live in close association with microorganisms, carrying beneficial bacteria while coping with pathogenic infections. Now, in a study published this week in PLoS Genetics, researchers from Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência ...
Genes that helped our ancestors store fat in times of famine may have been useful, but whether they cursed future generations with a predisposition toward obesity is a little more controversial. This popular "thrifty gene ...
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Together with colleagues, Dr Roy Müller from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany) has published a review article in the current issue of the Journal of the Royal Society Interface analyzing human and avian locomotion ...
Nature or nurture? The quest to understand why humans kill one another has occupied the minds of philosophers, sociologists and psychologists for centuries.
Despite evolving separately for 400 million years, some sharks and tuna share genetic traits linked to higher metabolism and quick swimming behaviour.
There are more than a dozen species of finch that evolved on the Galapagos Islands, each identified by beak shape and size. Some have strong beaks to crack nuts while others have long, fine beaks to grasp larvae with surgical ...
Looking around at the natural world, have you ever wondered why some groups of organisms contain huge numbers of species while others are seemingly barren?
Rabies will likely reach the Pacific Coast of Peru—where the virus currently does not occur—within four years, according to a paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Charles Darwin was right: Groups enjoy an advantage whose members are "ready to aid one another and to sacrifice themselves for the common good," according to a new study by researchers at Rice University, Texas A&M University ...
Almost half our genes can be the starting point for diseases. Scientists have identified 11,000 genes that occur in the human genome in variants that can cause disease. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary ...
A University of Adelaide-led project has overturned the theory that the evolution of human intelligence was simply related to the size of the brain—but rather linked more closely to the supply of blood to the brain.
One of the most interesting facts about mole rats - that, as with ants and termites, individuals specialise in particular tasks throughout their lives - turns out to be wrong. Instead, a new study led by the University of ...
There's no need to reinvent the genetic wheel.
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with members from France, Hungary and Madagascar has found that a type of carp bred to have fewer scales and subsequently released into the wild in Madagascar a century ago has devolved ...
Sick wild house mice spend time away from their social groups, leading to a decrease in their potential for disease transmission according to a new study by evolutionary biologists from the University of Zurich in collaboration ...
One of the great transformations required for the descendants of fish to become creatures that could walk on land was the replacement of long, elegant fin rays by fingers and toes. In the Aug. 17, 2016 issue of Nature, scientists ...
If you are a male barn swallow in the United States or the Mediterranean with dark red breast feathers, you're apt to wow potential mates. But if you have long outer tail feathers in the United States, or short ones in the ...
The new study that for the first time examined the internal anatomy of a fossil human relative's heel bone, or calcaneus, shows greater similarities with gorillas than chimpanzees.
New work by an international team of researchers shows that the cranium of modern Homo sapiens is poorly-suited to produce large biting forces due to an important limitation involving the jaw joint. The findings are consistent ...
For over 60 years, scientists have theorized that a person's body shape and size could be influenced by the climate of where they live. Now a new study from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, suggests there's more to ...
When you've got to go, but you're out there in space, zipped up in a spacesuit, with no toilet in sight and a crew of other astronauts around, what do you do?
We all know that when it rains, plants grow. When it doesn't, they don't.
In science, sometimes the best discoveries come when you're exploring something else entirely. That's the case with recent findings from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where a research team has ...
Graphene, a two-dimensional form of carbon in sheets just one atom in thick, has been the subject of widespread research, in large part because of its unique combination of strength, electrical conductivity, and chemical ...
Every year, trade winds over the Sahara Desert sweep up huge plumes of mineral dust, transporting hundreds of teragrams—enough to fill 10 million dump trucks—across North Africa and over the Atlantic Ocean. This dust ...
The claws of coconut crabs have the strongest pinching force of any crustacean, according to a study published November 23, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Shin-ichiro Oka from Okinawa Churashima Foundation, Japan, ...
People have a remarkable ability to remember and recall events from the past, even when those events didn't hold any particular importance at the time they occurred. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology ...
"Mood ring materials" could play an important role in minimizing and mitigating damage to the nation's failing infrastructure.
A groundbreaking study of the virosphere of the most populous animals - those without backbones such as insects, spiders and worms and that live around our houses - has uncovered 1445 viruses, revealing people have only scratched ...
Reporting this week (Wednesday Nov. 23) in the journal Nature an international team led by British Antarctic Survey (BAS) explains that present-day thinning and retreat of Pine Island Glacier, one of the largest and fastest ...
A naturally occurring predatory bacterium is able to work with the immune system to clear multi-drug resistant Shigella infections in zebrafish, according to a study published today in Current Biology.
Piezoelectric sensors measure changes in pressure, acceleration, temperature, strain or force and are used in a vast array of devices important to everyday life. However, these sensors often can be limited by the "white noise" ...
The government wants smartphone makers to lock out most apps when the phone is being used by someone driving a car.
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have developed a vaccine that blocks the pain-numbing effects of the opioid drugs oxycodone (oxy) and hydrocodone (hydro) in animal models. The vaccine also appears to decrease ...
In the age of WikiLeaks, Russian hacks and increased government surveillance, many computer users are feeling increasingly worried about how best to protect their personal information—even if they aren't guarding state ...
Researchers have revealed new atomic-scale details about pesky deposits that can stop or slow chemical reactions vital to fuel production and other processes. This disruption to reactions is known as deactivation or poisoning.
A study co-led by the University of East Anglia (UEA) has found that people with genes for high educational achievement tend to marry, and have children with, people with similar DNA.
The study, published as the cover article in BioMed Central's Avian Research, led by the Earlham Institute and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, explores the phylogenetic relationship between ...
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory are being credited with creating the first intermetallic double salt with platinum.
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers from France, the U.S. and Italy has found evidence from the Tohoku-Oki earthquake that sensors that measure changes in gravity might offer a way to warn people of impending disaster faster ...
A new analysis of subsistence data collected in three Arctic communities underscores the importance of social ties and sharing among households.
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with the Universities of Roehampton and Birmingham in the U.K. has found a unique way to measure the energy spent by tree-dwelling apes when faced with gaps in a jungle canopy. In their ...
Although recent election coverage may suggest otherwise, research shows that people are more likely to use positive words than negative words on the whole in their communications. Behavioral scientists have extensively documented ...
How can quantum information be stored as long as possible? An important step forward in the development of quantum memories has been achieved by a research team of TU Wien.
An enterprising researcher from The University of Manchester has developed a prototype tool that could help transform the lives of the blind and visually impaired.
It only takes a few seconds for an employee of one of the world's leading hacking companies to take a locked smartphone and pull the data from it.
Men and women don't communicate much differently from each other, at least when they get the same training and are working on the same type of written assignment. The findings come amid frequent studies that have discovered ...
Black light does more than make posters glow. Cornell researchers have developed a chemical tool to control inflammation that is activated by ultraviolet (UV) light.
Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis isolated an enzyme that controls the levels of two plant hormones simultaneously, linking the molecular pathways for growth and defense.
Education scholars say youth are duped by sponsored content and don't always recognize political bias of social messages.
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