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People typically sleep seven to eight hours in one stretch and stay awake for the rest of the day. Evolutionary scientists have assumed that this rhythm of sleep arose when our early ancestors went from being nocturnal to ...
Plants & Animals
23 hours ago
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7
The expression "you are what you eat" has taken on new meaning. In an experiment in fruit flies, or Drosophila melanogaster, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have found that adding different species of microbes ...
Evolution
Sep 18, 2019
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112
All living organisms exist and function only in cooperation with an abundance of symbiotic microorganisms, and have developed together with them over the course of the earth's history. This central finding of modern life ...
Evolution
Sep 17, 2019
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Early rice growers unwittingly gave barnyard grass a big hand, helping to give root to a rice imitator that is now considered one of the world's worst agricultural weeds.
Evolution
Sep 17, 2019
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58
An international research group at UBC, Harvard University and Cardiff Metropolitan University has discovered how the human heart has adapted to support endurance physical activities. This research examines how the human ...
Evolution
Sep 16, 2019
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25
Corn, soybean, and cotton farmers shudder at the thought of Palmer amaranth invading their fields. The aggressive cousin of waterhemp—itself a formidable adversary—grows extremely rapidly, produces hundreds of thousands ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 16, 2019
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116
In a recent study, an international team of researchers analyzed fish bones excavated from the Early Neolithic Jiahu site in Henan Province, China. By comparing the body-length distributions and species-composition ratios ...
Evolution
Sep 16, 2019
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88
Every living organism's cell has a complete copy of DNA, which is condensed tightly in chromosomes. Every time the cell needs to perform a function, it activates genes that open or close different regions in the DNA. Like ...
Evolution
Sep 16, 2019
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54
In the study, published in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution, the researchers developed the tool that uses information about the features of a weed species and the geography of the area in which it has been reported ...
Evolution
Sep 16, 2019
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11
In the past half-billion years, Earth has been hit again and again by mass extinctions, wiping out most species on the planet. And every time, life recovered and ultimately went on to increase in diversity.
Evolution
Sep 16, 2019
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What determines global patterns of biodiversity has been a puzzle for scientists since the days of von Humboldt, Darwin, and Wallace. Yet, despite two centuries of research, this question remains unanswered. The global pattern ...
Evolution
Sep 12, 2019
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336
It was a puzzle about birds.
Plants & Animals
Sep 12, 2019
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493
Nature is full of animals helping each other out. A classic example is meerkat cooperation. When the group is foraging for food, one individual will head to a vantage point and keep watch for predators. This selfless individual ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 12, 2019
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15
Researchers from the University of Chicago have used tools developed to explore 3-D movements and mechanics of modern-day fish jaws to analyze a fossil fish for the first time. Combined with CT imaging technology able to ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 11, 2019
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A new study by Yale scientists provides a key insight into a milestone event in the early evolution of life on Earth—the origin of the cell nucleus and complex cells called eukaryotes.
Evolution
Sep 11, 2019
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548
A team of researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of California has found that ghost crabs have a secondary means of communication—gnashing teeth inside their stomachs when threatened. ...
A team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has found that when bees experience positive versus negative events, their brains process and remember the events differently. In their paper published ...
In the version of evolutionary theory most of us are familiar with, randomly occurring variation in traits, caused by mutations in our DNA, can be fixed in a population through natural selection. However, writing in Epigenetics ...
Evolution
Sep 10, 2019
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290
Among our two closest phylogenetic relatives, chimpanzees remain by far the more thoroughly-studied and widely-recognized species, known for their high levels of cooperation especially among males, which includes sharing ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 10, 2019
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512
There are at least three species of electric eels (Electrophorus spp.), not just one as previously believed. Two new species have recently been described with São Paulo Research Foundation—FAPESP's support by a group of ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 10, 2019
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420
