Golden algae: They hunt, they kill, they cheat
Digging yields clues: Biologists connect burrowing behavior in mice to genes
Nature vs. nurture has long been one of the great debates in science—is behavior hard-wired into the brain, or determined by environment? In at least some cases, Harvard researchers are showing, how animals ...
Jan 16, 2013
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A snapshot of pupfish evolution in action
In evolution, fossils reveal, 'Court Jester' gets last laugh
(Phys.org)—The dominant factors in the rise and fall of the diversity of life on Earth has been a point of debate for scientists nearly as long as they have studied the processes of evolution.
Jan 10, 2013
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Nursing gerbils unravel benefit of multiple mothers in collective mammals
In mammals such as rodents that raise their young as a group, infants will nurse from their mother as well as other females, a dynamic known as allosuckling. Ecologists have long hypothesized that allosuckling lets newborns ...
Jan 09, 2013
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Low extinction rates made California a refuge for diverse plant species
Cheating slime mold gets the upper hand
A 'cheater' mutation (chtB) in Dictyostelium discoideum, a free living slime mould able to co-operate as social organism when food is scarce, allows the cheater strain to exploit its social partner, finds ...
Jan 08, 2013
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New book connects the human community to its cosmic roots
The 1969 "Woodstock" song by Joni Mitchell, it turns out, was onto something: "We are stardust / billion-year-old carbon."
Jan 08, 2013
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Racing to identify species as biodiversity shrinks
The origins of a genetic switch
Cilia, microscopic whip-like organelles that protrude from the surface of many cell types, are almost ubiquitous. They are present in all eukaryotes—organisms whose cells have a nucleus—and have diversified ...
Jan 02, 2013
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Did Lucy walk, climb, or both? Australopithecine ancestors—arboreal versus terrestrial habitat and locomotion
Dartmouth researchers investigate tree-climbing behavior of modern hunter-gatherers to elucidate our fossil ancestors' terrestrial versus arboreal preferences.
Dec 31, 2012
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Genomes of limpet, leech and worm put spotlight on lophotrochozoans
A new report in the journal Nature unveils three of the first genomes from a vast, understudied swath of the animal kingdom that includes as many as one-quarter of Earth's marine species. By publishing the ge ...
Dec 19, 2012
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Farm soil determines environmental fate of phosphorous
Just 20 years ago, the soils of the Amazon basin were thought unsuitable for large-scale agriculture, but then industrial agriculture—and the ability to fertilize on a massive scale—came to the Amazon. ...
Dec 17, 2012
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Advance in chromosomal evolution in sea cradles
A chromosomal study performed in a common Mediterranean chiton (sea cradle) provides information, relevant to systematic relationships of the species; furthermore the comparison of its karyotype with ones ...
Dec 12, 2012
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