Warming climate pushes plants up the mountain

In a rare opportunity to directly compare plant communities in the same area now with a survey taken 50 years ago, a University of Arizona-led research team has provided the first on-the-ground evidence that Southwestern ...

Study shows how early Earth kept warm enough to support life

Solving the "faint young sun paradox"—explaining how early Earth was warm and habitable for life beginning more than 3 billion years ago even though the sun was 20 percent dimmer than today—may not be as difficult as ...

Plant eaters, and the flora they eat, give peace a chance

(Phys.org) —Plants are often described as being in an evolutionary arms race with the creatures that eat them. Plant eaters develop new strategies for attacking, and plants acquire new ways to defend themselves.

Bridge species drive tropical engine of biodiversity

Although scientists have known since the middle of the 19th century that the tropics are teeming with species while the poles harbor relatively few, the origin of the most dramatic and pervasive biodiversity on Earth has ...

Guppies and sexual conflict? It's a genital arms race

(Phys.org) —It's not always easy to tell if a fish is male or female: they look more or less the same. But there are exceptions, such as guppies and, as with humans, guppy genitalia varies in size across the species.

Why animals compare the present with the past

Humans, like other animals, compare things. We care not only how well off we are, but whether we are better or worse off than others around us, or than we were last year. New research by scientists at the University of Bristol ...

Study proposes alternative way to explain life's complexity

Evolution skeptics argue that some biological structures, like the brain or the eye, are simply too complex for natural selection to explain. Biologists have proposed various ways that so-called 'irreducibly complex' structures ...

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