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In many species, including humans, the young are often more susceptible to infection than adults, even after accounting for prior exposure to infection. From an evolutionary perspective this may seem puzzling, as dying young ...
There has long been a debate among biologists over whether the evolution of new traits requires new genes to evolve or whether they can arise simply from the recruitment of existing genetic pathways, says developmental biologist ...
In humans and other mammals, the stem cells that give rise to all blood cells are located in the bone. But in fish, blood stem cells are found in the kidney. Since the late 1970s, when biologists first realized that blood ...
A new University of Colorado Boulder-led study sheds light on the genetic mechanisms that allowed sunflowers to undergo a relatively rapid evolutionary transition from wild to domesticated in just over 5,000 years.
NC State University researchers have shed new light on the evolution of fly chromosomes by identifying a gene indispensable for male survival in a devastating livestock pest species. What they found could have important implications ...
Researchers studying the impact of extreme climate conditions on biodiversity found a "tipping point" at which species, under pressure from dwindling food supplies due to climate change, must either evolve to take advantage ...
Poisonous moths use bright red spots to warn predators to avoid them—but natural variation in these wing markings doesn't provide clear indications of how toxic individual moths might be—new research shows.
Disgust has long been recognised as an emotion which evolved to help our ancestors avoid infection, but now researchers have been able to show the human disgust system is likely to be structured around the people, practices ...
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (originally published in 1859) shares a deplorable fate with many other classics: it is known to everyone, yet rarely read.
Compared with many animals, human eyes aren't particularly adept at distinguishing colors or seeing in dim light. But by one measure at least—something called visual acuity—human eyes can see fine details that most animals ...
From the colour of our eyes to the size of our brain, humans have been adapting to their environment, acquiring new abilities and losing others. We take a look at how evolution is still shaping us.
Who would have suspected that a handheld genetic test used to unmask sushi bars pawning off tilapia for tuna could deliver deep insights into evolution, including how new species emerge?
Although evolution has left dragonflies virtually unchanged for roughly 300 million years, new research by a UTM biologist reveals that understanding small physiological activities in these insects could reveal a deeper understanding ...
Infections caused by the mosquito-borne eastern equine encephalitis virus (EEEV) are severe and have high mortality rates for horses—90 percent—and humans—33 percent, with significant brain damage in most human survivors.
Muscles once thought 'uniquely human' have been discovered in several ape species, challenging long-held theories on the origin and evolution of human soft tissues. The findings question the anthropocentric view that certain ...
The human brain is disproportionately large. And while abundant grey matter confers certain intellectual advantages, sustaining a big brain is costly—consuming a fifth of energy in the human body.
Why did birds lose their teeth? Was it so they would be lighter in the air? Or are pointy beaks better for worm-eating than the jagged jaws of dinosaur ancestors?
Researchers report important new insights into evolution following a study of mitochondrial DNA from about 5 million specimens covering about 100,000 animal species.
Evolution may be responsible for a range of complex traits, including height and waist-to-hip ratio, and diseases such as schizophrenia, research from The University of Queensland shows.
Researchers at the University of Strasbourg have discovered a striking similarity between the way carbon dioxide (CO2) reacts with metals and the way that ancient microbes use CO2 to build their biomass, providing potential ...
Today's baleen whales (Mysticetes) support their massive bodies by filtering huge volumes of small prey from seawater using comb-like baleen in their mouths much like a sieve. But new evidence reported in the journal Current ...
Our cerebral cortex, a sheet of neurons, connections and circuits, comprises "ancient" regions such as the hippocampus and "new" areas such as the six-layered "neocortex," found only in mammals and most prominently in humans. ...
A University of Kansas anthropological geneticist is part of an international research team working to shed light upon one of the unanswered questions concerning the peopling of the New World: Namely, what was the size of ...
A new study has cast doubt on leading theory for how tiny creatures have evolved for tens of millions of years—without ever having sex.
In a study of 11 different plant species, published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, researchers at the University of Oxford have shown that the speed at which plants evolve is linked to how good they are at photosynthesis.
The critical role that breast feeding plays in infant survival may have led, during the last ice age, to a common genetic mutation in East Asians and Native Americans that also, surprisingly, affects the shape of their teeth.
An international consortium of scientists is proposing what is arguably the most ambitious project in the history of biology: sequencing the DNA of all known eukaryotic species on Earth.
Researchers at Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU) have developed a new computational method that predicts harmful mutations in mammalian species. As more livestock producers are using genetic tests ...
Predicting chance-driven evolution seems impossible. Nevertheless, scientists from AMOLF in Amsterdam and the ESPCI in Paris have succeeded in making predictions about the evolution of a set of genes in E. coli. When and ...
Viruses are more likely to evolve in similar ways in related species—raising the risk that they will "jump" from one species to another, new research shows.
Highly mobile eyebrows that can be used to express a wide range of subtle emotions may have played a crucial role in human survival, new research from the University of York suggests.
Bucking a central tenet of biology, researchers at the University of California San Diego and their colleagues have discovered evidence for a new path of evolution, and with it a deeper understanding of how quickly organisms ...
Martha Jones: It's like in those films: if you step on a butterfly, you change the future of the human race.
Biological evolution takes place over generations. But imagine if it could be expedited beyond the incremental change envisaged by Darwin to a matter of individual experience. Such things are dreamt of by so-called "transhumanists". ...
Pioneering early people who lived at the end of the last ice age actually carried on with life as usual despite plummeting temperatures, a study at a world-famous archaeological site in North Yorkshire suggests.
Arthropods are among the most successful animals on the planet. They inhabit the sea (horseshoe crabs), the sky (fruit flies), and the earth (scorpions) in vast numbers and are defined by their exoskeleton exteriors and segmented ...
For a long time, hybridization—when distinct species mate and produce offspring—was thought to be a mistake. Yet, advancements in genomic testing tools have revealed naturally occurring hybridization as a fairly common ...
Experimental evolution is a good way to enhance our current understanding of how genomes—or sets of chromosomes in an organism's cells—evolve and the role of individual mutations in adaptation.
A team of researchers from institutions at the leading edge of the new field of palaeoproteomics have published guidelines to provide it with a firm foundation. Ancient proteins are used to study everything from extinct species ...
Animals that carry a physical impediment can work harder to rear their young as a result, a study of insects has shown.
Researchers trying to better understand and treat blood-sugar disorders such as type 2 diabetes can look for new clues in odd little fish that dwell in Mexican caves.
Mating between domesticated dogs and wild wolves over hundreds of years has left a genetic mark on the wolf gene pool, new research has shown.
Information is typically stored in physical systems, such as memory devices. But in a new study, physicists have investigated an alternative way to store and hide information, which is by storing it only in the quantum correlations ...
The earth is rising in one part of Antarctica at one of the fastest rates ever recorded, as ice rapidly disappears and weight is lifted off the bedrock, a new international study has found.
An international team of astronomers have made the most precise test of gravity outside our own solar system.
Virginia Commonwealth University researchers have discovered a novel strategy for creating superatoms—combinations of atoms that can mimic the properties of more than one group of elements of the periodic table. These superatoms ...
Synthetic polymers are ubiquitous—nylon, polyester, Teflon and epoxy, to name just a few—and these polymers are all long, linear structures that tangle into imprecise structures. Chemists have long dreamed of making polymers ...
Princeton chemists have found a way to make a naturally occurring enzyme take on a new, artificial role, which has significant implications for modern chemistry, including pharmaceutical production. Their work appears in ...
Take a glass thread a thousand times thinner than a human hair. Use it as a wire between two metals. Hit it with a laser pulse that lasts a millionth of a billionth of a second.
An international group of astronomers have carried out multi-wavelength observations of HESS J1943+213 and found evidence supporting the hypothesis that this gamma-ray source is an extreme blazar. The finding is reported ...
The U.S. oil and gas industry emits 13 million metric tons of the potent greenhouse gas methane from its operations each year, 60 percent more than estimated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to a new ...
In a study published in Science this week, the researchers describe the dielectric properties of water that is only a few molecules thick. Such water was previously predicted to exhibit a reduced electric response but it ...
Experiencing regret can leave a "bad taste" in one's mouth and drive an individual to compensate for one's losses. This immediate post-regret phenomenon was once thought to be unique to humans, but it has been recently demonstrated ...
Opioids are powerful painkillers that act on the brain, but they have a range of harmful side effects including addiction. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (MPIB) in collaboration with researchers ...
Many animals have evolved fur or feather colors to blend in with the environment and hide from predators. But how do animals stay camouflaged when their environment changes with each new season? Researchers at the University ...
States will be able to force more people to pay sales tax when they make online purchases under a Supreme Court decision Thursday that will leave shoppers with lighter wallets but is a big financial win for states.
About a decade ago, astronomers discovered a population of small, but massive galaxies called "red nuggets." A new study using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory indicates that black holes have squelched star formation in these ...
How did the zebra get its stripes, or the leopard its spots? Mankind has been trying to answer such questions since our earliest recorded days, and they resonate throughout the extant mythologies and folklores of an earlier ...
Tiny freshwater fish have a view of the world that blows Google Street View out of the water—using different parts of their eyes to deliver optimum uses of colour, black-and-white and ultraviolet.
Scientists seeking to unlock the secrets of cellular aging have identified a gene that triggers senescence, a phenomenon in which cells stop dividing.
For the first time ever, researchers at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) have identified a specific amino acid residue that is responsible for inverting the communication between the opening of the ...
A galaxy with at least one active supermassive black hole – named OJ 287 – has caused many irritations and questions in the past. The emitted radiation of this object spans a wide range – from the radio up to the highest ...
Scientists have demonstrated for the first time that horses integrate human facial expressions and voice tones to perceive human emotion, regardless of whether the person is familiar or not.
Deep in the night in muddy African rivers, a fish uses electrical charges to sense the world around it and communicate with other members of its species. Signaling in electrical spurts that last only a few tenths of a thousandth ...
A so-called "jumping gene" that researchers long considered either genetic junk or a pernicious parasite is actually a critical regulator of the first stages of embryonic development, according to a new study in mice led ...
Among the most studied protein machines in history, mTORC1 has long been known to sense whether a cell has enough energy to build the proteins it needs to multiply as part of growth. Because faulty versions of mTORC1 contribute ...
Infrared cameras are the heat-sensing eyes that help drones find their targets, even in the dead of night or through heavy fog.
Each spring, millions of nocturnal Bogong moths hatch across breeding grounds throughout southeastern Australia before flying over 1,000 kilometers through the dark night to reach a limited number of high alpine caves in ...
When cells grow and divide to ensure a biological function—such as a properly working organ—DNA must be unwound from its typical tightly packed form and copied into RNA to create proteins. When this process goes awry—if ...
Exposure to fracking chemicals and wastewater promotes fat cell development, or adipogenesis, in living cells in a laboratory, according to a new Duke University-led study.
A new synthetic enzyme, crafted from DNA rather than protein, flips lipid molecules within the cell membrane, triggering a signal pathway that could be harnessed to induce cell death in cancer cells.
University of Alberta paleontologists discovered a new species of marine lizard that lived 70 to 75 million years ago, with its muscle and skin remarkably well preserved.
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