Flies give another twist in the evolving story of heredity

Thanks to the father of modern genetics, Gregor Mendel, and his experiments cross-breading peas, the textbooks tell us that we know how inheritance works: we get 50% of our genes from our mums and 50% of our genes from our ...

The 'memory' of starvation is in your genes

During the winter of 1944, the Nazis blocked food supplies to the western Netherlands, creating a period of widespread famine and devastation. The impact of starvation on expectant mothers produced one of the first known ...

Revolutionary new view on heritability in plants

Complex heritable traits are not only determined by changes in the DNA sequence. Scientists from the University of Groningen Bioinformatics Centre, together with their French colleagues, have shown that epigenetic marks can ...

The fastest sperm may not be best

For sea squirts the key to a long and happy life is to be fertilized not by a fast sperm, but by one that stands the test of time, Dr Angela Crean, from the Evolution and Ecology Research Centre at the University of NSW, ...

Teaching complete evolutionary stories increases learning

Many students have difficulty understanding and explaining how evolution operates. In search of better ways to teach the subject, researchers at Michigan State University developed complete evolutionary case studies spanning ...

When leaving your wealth to your sister's children makes sense

In most human societies, men pass on their worldly goods to their wife's children. But in about ten percent of societies, men transfer their wealth to their sister's sons, a process called matrilineal inheritance. A new study ...

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