Elizabeth Sibert is rewriting the story of how the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs affected fish, and she's doing it one tooth at a time.
These days, mammals can use their forelimbs to swim, jump, fly, climb, dig and just about everything in between, but the question of how all that diversity evolved has remained a vexing one for scientists.
A new study sheds light on how toothed whales adapted their sonar abilities to occupy different environments. The study shows that as animals grew bigger, they were able to put more energy into their echolocation sounds—but ...
A team of researchers at Dalhousie University has found evidence that suggests hemimastigotes represent a major new branch of evolutionary life. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes their genetic ...
Islands have been vital laboratories for advancing evolutionary theory since the pioneering work of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in the 19th century.
Modern medicine's ability to keep us alive makes it tempting to think human evolution may have stopped. Better healthcare disrupts a key driving force of evolution by keeping some people alive longer, making them more likely ...
Zoologist Sarah Otto, with the University of British Columbia, has published a report in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B regarding human influence on evolution over the past century. She notes that the number ...
The size of a male house sparrow's bib has long been associated with the bird's fighting abilities and status within the flock. But an international team of researchers has shown there is little evidence to support it.
A variety of animals have male-specific ornament traits and these ornaments are favored by female choice. Which male traits are preferred by females often varies among females. Genetic mechanisms that create and maintain ...
Plants are boring. They just sit there photosynthesizing while animals have all the fun. Right? Not so much. Take a look at the interactions between ants and plants—plants have evolved features specifically to make them ...
Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have shown that the environment-driven evolution of a unique ovipositor in the female fruit fly Drosophila suzukii may have caused coevolution of the male genitalia; new features ...
In a process known as directed evolution, scientists reengineer biomolecules to find ones that perform beneficial new functions. The field is revolutionizing drug development, chemical engineering and other applications, ...
The bending of a hook into wire to fish for the handle of a basket is surprisingly challenging for young children under eight years of age. Now, cognitive biologists and comparative psychologists led by Isabelle Laumer and ...
How predictable is evolution? The answer has long been debated by biologists grappling with the extent to which history affects the repeatability of evolution.
African and Asian rainforest hunter-gatherers share short stature, and now an international team of researchers has shown that this is an example of convergent adaptation that may also be linked to changes in cardiac development ...
Evolutionary theory predicts that the fitness of an individual is maximized when the genetic differences between its parents are neither too small nor too large but some ideal amount known as the optimal mating distance.
A team of researchers from the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, Harvard University, the University of Exeter and the University of California has come up with a new theory to explain the short stature of pygmies ...
Strap on a diving mask and fins and slip under the crystal-clear water near a coral reef in Indonesia, Papua-New Guinea or the Philippines, and you'll immediately see why divers and snorkelers from across the world flock ...
Diverse communities of plants and animals typically perform better than monocultures. However, the mechanisms that are responsible for this have so far been a mystery to science. Biologists at the University of Zurich have ...
A genetic scan of a massive number of samples taken from tuberculosis patients across China has shown a surprising genetic uniformity: just two "strains" of the tuberculosis bacterium account for 99.4 percent of all cases.
Finnish and American researchers in evolutionary biology conducted an online experiment and survey revealing that women prefer and are more likely to invest in their daughters and men in their sons. The study was designed ...
An insect larva found in the caves of Intervales State Park, an Atlantic Rainforest remnant in the municipality of Ribeirão Grande, São Paulo State, Brazil, was initially of no interest to the research group led by biochemist ...
In 2016, virtually overnight, one giraffe species turned into four. Using new, even more extensive genetic tests, Senckenberg scientists have now been able to show that the four giraffe populations identified as separate ...
The evolution of barn swallows, a bird ubiquitous to bridges and sheds around the world, might be even more closely tied to humans than previously thought, according to new study from the University of Colorado Boulder.
By wings or maybe riding on debris, that's how a now-flightless and rare species of tiny birds likely got to Inaccessible Island, an aptly named small island of volcanic origin in the middle of the South Atlantic.
By studying barn owls, scientists at Johns Hopkins University believe they've taken an important step toward solving the longstanding mystery of how the brain chooses what most deserves attention.
By the end of every spring semester, students in my introductory biology course at Vanderbilt University have become quite familiar with natural variation in human sex chromosomes. They know, for example, that most females ...
A new study, led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, suggests that early hominin dispersals beyond Africa did not involve adaptations ...
The first vertebrates on Earth were fish, and scientists believe they first appeared around 480 million years ago. But fossil records from this time are spotty, with only small fragments identified. By 420 million years ago, ...
A team of evolutionary biologists from the University of Konstanz, headed by Prof. Dr. Axel Meyer, has discovered the genetic basis for the repeated evolution of colour patterns. The findings about the stripes of the diverse ...
An international team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and the University of Oxford has revealed that New Caledonian crows are able to create tools by combining two or more otherwise non-functional ...
The evolution of giant tortoises might not be linked to islands, as has previously been thought. In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers from Argentina and Germany have presented the most comprehensive family tree of extinct ...
For over 200,000 years, humans and their gut microbiomes have coevolved into some of the most complex collections of living organisms on the planet. But as human lifestyles vary from the urban to rural, so do the bacterial ...
Gene AMY1, which kickstarts digestion of starch in the mouth, is associated with blood glucose levels and digestion of carbohydrates, with implications for understanding human evolutionary biology and the gut microbiome.
Planktonic foraminifera (forams) - tiny, shelled organisms that float in the sea—left behind one of the most complete fossil records of evolutionary history in deep sea deposits. Consequently, evolutionists have a relatively ...
House mice carrying a specific selfish supergene move from one population to another much more frequently than their peers. This finding from a University of Zurich study shows for the first time that a gene of this type ...
Humans are exterminating animal and plant species so quickly that nature's built-in defence mechanism, evolution, cannot keep up. An Aarhus-led research team calculated that if current conservation efforts are not improved, ...
Color vision, consisting of ocular color detection, is achieved with complicated neural mechanisms in the eyes. Researchers from Osaka City University in Japan have found color detection with a simple mechanism in the fish ...
Are human disturbances to the environment driving evolutionary changes in animals and plants? A new study conducted by McGill researchers finds that, on average, human disturbances don't appear to accelerate the process of ...
Dolphins, whales and other cetaceans are susceptible to many of the same health hazards as humans including mercury, brevotoxin (e.g. Red Tide), and lobomycosis. They also serve as important sentinel species to highlight ...
Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) have discovered a gene that appears to play a vital role in pheromone sensing. The gene is conserved across fish and mammals and over 400 million years of vertebrate ...
An international team of astronomers has observed the peculiar activity of a nuclear transient event known as PS1-13cbe. The transient, which occurred in the nucleus of the galaxy SDSS J222153.87+003054.2, experienced a rapid ...
Pushing the limits of cryo-electron microscopy, University of California, Berkeley, scientists have captured freeze-frames of the changing shape of a huge molecule, one of the body's key molecular machines, as it locks onto ...
Regulation of gene expression—turning genes on or off, increasing or decreasing their expression—is critical for defining cell identity during development and coordinating cellular activity throughout the cell's lifetime. ...
A breakthrough by chemists at the University of Chicago may one day open possibilities for making chemicals from plants rather than oil, by creating a new method to crack certain tough carbon-to-carbon bonds.
We are all, quite literally, made of star dust. Many of the chemicals that compose our planet and our bodies were formed directly by stars. Now, a new study using observations by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reports for ...
A collaboration between Nagoya University and TU Braunschweig finds evidence that when projectiles hit soft clumps of dust or hard clumps of loose glass beads, the scaling laws for energy dissipation and energy transfer are ...
Plant speed breeding could be part of the solution to minimise the devastating effects of drought and climate change on crops in the future, according to a University of Queensland researcher.
The path of light is bent by mass, an effect predicted by Einstein's theory of gravity, and when a massive galaxy or cluster lies along our line-of-sight to a more distant galaxy its matter will act as a lens to image the ...
When Konrad Rykaczewski moved to Arizona's Sonora Desert region six years ago he took a water bottle and sprayed the plants in his front yard, not to water them, but to see how they interacted with water droplets.
Scientists at the University of Liverpool have uncovered some unexpected 'foreign' genes in the tiny itch-inducing chigger mite and its more benign but enormous cousin, the giant velvet mite.
An international team led by Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA) researcher Vardan Adibekyan used a novel method to detect solar siblings. The article was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
A team of astronomers from Israel, the U.S. and Russia have identified a disrupted galaxy resembling a giant tadpole, complete with an elliptical head and a long, straight tail, about 300 million light years away from Earth. ...
Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a mathematical model that sheds new light on the fundamental processes of gene expression in cells.
The black hole at the centre of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, has been visualised in virtual reality for the first time. The details are described in an article published in the open access journal Computational Astrophysics ...
Scientists from the University of Wollongong (UOW), working with colleagues at China's Beihang University, Nankai University, and Institute of Physics at Chinese Academy of Sciences, have successfully created an atomic scale, ...
Urinating into a cup may be a medical necessity for monitoring the health of the kidney and other issues, but it's often uncomfortable, embarrassing and messy—especially for women. But what if there were a way to comfortably ...
Whether it's the acrobatics of a flock of starlings or the synchronized swimming of a school of fish, nature is full of examples of large-scale collective behavior. Humans also exhibit this behavior, most notably in pelotons, ...
Bridgett vonHoldt is best known for her work with dogs and wolves, so she was surprised when a bird biologist pulled her aside and said, "I really think you can help me solve this problem." So she turned to a mystery he'd ...
Until recently, scientists thought of viruses as mostly small infectious agents, tiny compared to typical bacteria and human cells. So imagine the surprise when biologist Jeff Blanchard and Ph.D. student Lauren Alteio at ...
Wombats, the chubby and beloved, short-legged marsupials native to Australia, are central to a biological mystery in the animal kingdom: How do they produce cube-shaped poop? Patricia Yang, a postdoctoral fellow in mechanical ...
An unexpected twist from a four-seam or a two-seam fastball can make the difference in a baseball team winning or losing the World Series. However, "some explanations regarding the different pitches are flat-out wrong," said ...
Marvel comics superheroes Ant-Man and the Wasp—nom de guerre stars of the eponymous 2018 film—possess the ability to temporarily shrink down to the size of insects, while retaining the mass and strength of their normal ...
Imagine an airport where thousands of planes, empty of fuel, are left abandoned on the tarmac. That is what has been happening for decades with satellites that circle the Earth.
Archaeologists say they found tombs at a Bolivian quarry containing remains from more than 500 years ago that give an insight into the interaction of various peoples with the expanding Inca empire.
SpaceX got the green light this week from US authorities to put a constellation of nearly 12,000 satellites into orbit in order to boost cheap, wireless internet access by the 2020s.
The symmetries that govern the world of elementary particles at the most elementary level could be radically different from what has so far been thought. This surprising conclusion emerges from new work published by theoreticians ...
The next time you're gazing out of the window in search of inspiration, keep in mind the material you're looking through was forged inside the heart of an exploding ancient star.
In mid-December, twin discs will begin glowing blue on the underside of a minibus-sized spacecraft in deep space. At that moment Europe and Japan's BepiColombo mission will have just come a crucial step closer to Mercury.
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