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Somewhere in the American Southwest or northern Mexico, there are probably the ruins of a scarlet macaw breeding operation dating to between 900 and 1200 C.E., according to a team of archaeologists who sequenced the mitochondrial ...
Chimpanzees are generally known as the ripe fruit specialist among the great apes, but also incorporate other food items such as leaves and seedpods into their diets. Savannah chimpanzees are thought to rely on these non-fruit ...
Animals that have either migrated to or been introduced in Central Europe, such as the Asian bush mosquito or the Asian ladybeetle, have adapted well to their new homes due to changing climatic conditions. If these newcomers ...
Periwinkles, struggling to survive the seashore battleground, have developed a genetic 'toolkit' to help them adapt to different environments, a new study shows.
The question of why we sleep has been a longstanding subject of debate, with some theories suggesting that slumber provides respite for the brain, which allows it to filter out insignificant neural connections, build new ...
Plants carry out photosynthesis and thus form the basis for most life on Earth. Researchers from Kaiserslautern and Potsdam have now investigated whether the production of photosynthesis proteins in land plants and algae ...
In 1859, when Charles Darwin first articulated the theory of evolution, he speculated that a process of natural selection led species to adapt to their environments over time. He believed traits that helped an organism survive ...
A new study reveals that all insects use specialized odorant receptors that enable them to detect and pursue mates, identify enemies, find food and—unfortunately for humans—spread disease. This puts to rest a recent hypothesis ...
Placodes and neural crests are defining features of vertebrates (animals with a spinal cord surrounded by cartilage or bone). Placodes are embryonic structures that develop into sensory organs such as ear, nose, and lens ...
It is one of the most unusual primates on the planet—famed for its large eyes, big ears and thin, bony finger used for probing.
Gut microbes provide many services for their hosts, including digesting their food. Researchers have long known that mammals with specialized diets, such as carnivores and anteaters, have special types of gut microbes that ...
The reproductive history of the unisexual, ladies-only salamander species is full of evolutionary surprises.
Researchers from The University of Western Australia and the Australian National University have uncovered new evidence that suggests dingoes arrived in Australia between 3,348 and 3,081 years ago, more recently than previously ...
Understanding the many factors that have played into shaping the biodiversity within Earth's ecosystems can be daunting. In a major step to that end, an international team of researchers built a computer simulation that takes ...
Their violent kicks rattle the small army plane flying over Siberia as it transports the four rare horses from Prague to the vast Mongolian steppe where the once near-extinct species is slowly recovering.
For some animals—such as beetles, ants, toads, and primates—short-term social isolation can be just as vital as social interaction to development and long-term evolution. In a review published July 17 in the journal Trends ...
We humans will put up with a lot from our relatives. Yet most of us are less charitable with people outside of our family circle.
After Halloween, people tend to forget about bats. But, for farmers, residents of Kenya, and scientists, bats are a part of everyday life. While North America has 44 species, Kenya, a country the size of Texas, has 110 bat ...
For lovers throughout the animal kingdom, finding a suitable mate requires the right chemistry. Now, scientists at The Rockefeller University have been able to map an unexpected path in which evolution arranged for animals ...
A scientific consortium led by Dr. Eleanor Scerri, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, has found that human ancestors ...
For every two species of mammal there is one species of cichlid fish, which goes to show that biodiversity is distributed rather unevenly among animals. But why? And to what extent can evolution be predicted? A variety of ...
Bale monkey's that live in continuous bamboo forests have different mitochondrial DNA to Bale monkeys living in fragmented forests, according to a study published in the open access journal, BMC Evolutionary Biology.
For more than a century, scientists have understood that natural selection have profound effects on how an animal looks—Anolis lizards that spend more time on the ground, for example, might need longer legs for running, ...
Scientists at Washington State University and China Jiliang University have discovered that the quality of the host rice plant determines whether the brown planthopper, a major pest on rice in Asia, grows short wings or long ...
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On the day that one becomes an octogenarian, nature bestows a mathematical birthday gift: a gradual reprieve from the relentlessly increasing likelihood that he or she will die in the coming year.
The loss of anatomical features is a frequent evolutionary event. For example, humans and other great apes have lost their tails and whales have lost their legs. The most convincing evidence comes from the presence of vestiges ...
New U of T Scarborough research has found that the ancestor of the modern day mountain beaver had a larger relative brain size.
The most characteristic feature of domestic animals is tame behaviour. An international team of scientists has now used high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study how domestication affects brain morphology ...
Nipple size varies markedly from woman to woman, whereas male nipples are more uniform. This finding goes against a common assumption of evolutionary biology, say Ashleigh Kelly and her colleagues from the University of Queensland ...
This past spring break, Associate Professor of Biology Stephanie Rollmann and her lab travelled to the picturesque Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, an International Biosphere Reserve in Ajo, AZ. They were in search of ...
Some of the earliest complex organisms on Earth—possibly some of the earliest animals to exist—got big not to compete for food, but to spread their offspring as far as possible.
Men's testosterone levels are largely determined by their environment during childhood, according to new research.
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 ...
A trio of researchers from the University of Melbourne and the University of Life Science, Sydney, has found an isolated mammal species that lost its fear of predators in just 13 generations. In their paper published in the ...
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 ...
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.
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.
Tech magnate Elon Musk's SpaceX vowed Monday to send its first astronauts into orbit on schedule next year—part of a drive to restore America's dominance of the space race.
If you happen to have a box of spaghetti in your pantry, try this experiment: Pull out a single spaghetti stick and hold it at both ends. Now bend it until it breaks. How many fragments did you make? If the answer is three ...
The discovery of buckyballs surprised and delighted chemists in the 1980s, nanotubes jazzed physicists in the 1990s, and graphene charged up materials scientists in the 2000s, but one nanoscale carbon structure—a negatively ...
Research led by the University of Bristol has uncovered evidence that early farmers were adapting to climate change 8,200 years ago.
Neutron stars are the smallest, densest stars in the universe, born out of the gravitational collapse of extremely massive stars. True to their name, neutron stars are composed almost entirely of neutrons—neutral subatomic ...
More than a decade after the introduction of the first smartphone, we are now awash in always-on technologies—email, IM, social media, Slack, Yammer, and so on. All that connectivity means we are constantly sharing our ...
Cut off a salamander's tail and, in a few weeks, a near-perfect replacement grows. Do the same to a lizard and a new tail will regrow, but it won't be the same as the original. By comparing tail regeneration between the two ...
MIT researchers have developed novel photography optics that capture images based on the timing of reflecting light inside the optics, instead of the traditional approach that relies on the arrangement of optical components. ...
Tuning materials for optimal optical and electrical properties is becoming commonplace. Now, researchers and manufacturers may be able to tune materials for thermal conductivity by using a squid-inspired protein made of multiple ...
A new, super-insulating gel developed by researchers at CU Boulder could dramatically increase the energy efficiency of skyscrapers and other buildings, and might one day help scientists build greenhouse-like habitats for ...
An international team of researchers has detected hydrogen sulfide emission from the dense protoplanetary disk around the star GG Tauri A. It is the first detection of this chemical compound in a protoplanetary disk. The ...
Scientists on Monday unveiled a previously unknown species of giant pterosaur, the first creatures with a backbone to fly under their own power.
Historic space weather may help us understand what's coming next, according to new research by the University of Warwick.
New technology developed by a team of McGill University scientists shows potential to streamline the analysis of proteins, offering a quick, high volume and cost-effective tool to hospitals and research labs alike.
A team of scientists has uncovered new molecular properties of water—a discovery of a phenomenon that had previously gone unnoticed.
One of the most remarkable things about the iconic yellow and blue stripes of zebrafish is that they reliably appear at all.
The release of the "Paradise Papers" and "Panama Papers" exposed how multinationals, politicians and the wealthy use offshore tax havens to conceal their wealth and money flows, and reduce their exposure to tax. Now, a team ...
Researchers have demonstrated holonomic quantum gates under zero-magnetic field at room temperature, which could enable the realization of fast and fault-tolerant universal quantum computers.
Scientists have found that 4.02 billion year old silica-rich felsic rocks from the Acasta River, Canada—the oldest rock formation known on Earth—probably formed at high temperatures and at a surprisingly shallow depth ...
Groundwater contamination is increasingly recognized as a widespread environmental problem. The most important course of action often involves long-term monitoring. But what is the most cost-effective way to monitor when ...
A study exploring the coupling between heat and particle currents in a gas of strongly interacting atoms highlights the fundamental role of quantum correlations in transport phenomena, breaks the Wiedemann-Franz law, and ...
Lasers are widely used as high power sources of light operating at a specific frequency. But how does this frequency get selected when a laser is turned on, and how quickly?
A new form of electronics manufacturing which embeds silicon nanowires into flexible surfaces could lead to radical new forms of bendable electronics, scientists say.
Fruit flies don't appear to use their tiny, translucent wings for optimal flight, as one might expect. The speedy appendages seem to be doing double duty, helping the insect sniff out food, mates and other important scents, ...
A simple and fast microwave experiment with the common chemical element phosphorus at Flinders University has opened the prospect of more affordable and effective super-thin solar cells.
When wildfires burn, they don't only damage land, homes, and businesses. Wildfire emissions, which can be transported over long distances, can be toxic and contribute to the formation of secondary pollutants such as ozone ...
Ethics Unwrapped, a video-based behavioral ethics curriculum created at The University of Texas at Austin and adopted by educational institutions around the world, effectively increases student understanding of ethics and ...
Melting of ice shelves in West Antarctica speeds up and slows down in response to changes in deep ocean temperature, and is far more variable than previously thought, according to new research published this week in the journal ...
Long before humans started injecting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal, the level of atmospheric CO2 rose significantly as the Earth came out of its last ice age. Many scientists ...
Vortices are common in nature, but their formation can be hampered by long range forces. In work recently published in Nature Materials, an international team of researchers has used mapped X-ray magnetic linear and circular ...
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