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The bodies of ants and other insects are covered with a thin, wax-like layer that protects them from desiccation and enables them to exchange information, in social insects, for instance, to differentiate between enemies ...
Small, seemingly insignificant mutations in fruit flies may actually hold clues as to how a species will evolve tens of millions of years in the future.
An unspoken frustration for evolutionary biologists over the past 100 years, says Craig Albertson at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is that genetics can only account for a small percentage of variation in the physical ...
Scientists examining the multiple eyes found on the tentacles of fan worms have discovered they evolved independently from their other visual systems, specifically to support the needs of their lifestyle.
Evolution doesn't have to take millions of years. New research shows that a type of lizard living on man-made islands in Brazil has developed a larger head than its mainland cousins in a period of only 15 years.
Honey bees that consistently fail to respond to obvious social cues share something fundamental with autistic humans, researchers report in a new study. Genes most closely associated with autism spectrum disorders in humans ...
What do a swollen sprained ankle and a new pregnancy have in common? Believe it or not, they're both closely tied to the body's inflammation response.
Relationships where two organisms depend on each other, known as symbiosis, evoke images of partnership and cooperation. But a new study in Nature Ecology and Evolution shows that, when it comes to certain microorganisms, ...
Malaria was already widespread on Sardinia by the Roman period, long before the Middle Ages, as indicated by research at the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine of the University of Zurich with the help of a Roman who died ...
Scientists have discovered bacteria are able to "fine-tune" their resistance to antibiotics – raising the possibility of some superbugs being resistant to drugs which they have never even been in contact with.
Using the largest and most informative molecular phylogenetic dataset ever analysed, evolutionary biologists were able to construct a new phylogenetic tree of jawed vertebrates. This new tree resolves several key relationships ...
For mice and men, a strength in one area of Darwinian fitness may mean a deficiency in another. A look at Olympic athletes shows that a wrestler is built much differently than a marathoner. It's long been supposed that strength ...
Instead of having more children, a grandmother may pass on her genes more successfully by using her cognitive abilities to directly or indirectly aid her existing children and grandchildren. Such an advantage could have driven ...
A common bacteria is furthering evidence that evolution is not entirely a blind process, subject to random changes in the genes, but that environmental stressors can also play a role.
Prized for their plumpness, poultry farmers have made incredible gains through agricultural breeding programs to maximize chicken size and weight to benefit worldwide consumption, where demand continues to grow the most for ...
Genes provide instructions to cells in the body telling them what to do and not do in order to function optimally. Small changes in genes, called mutations, can have major consequences. Similar to a glitch in a computer's ...
The size and swimming speed of sperm are controlled by a single supergene in birds, according to a new study by the University of Sheffield.
The red algae called Porphyra and its ancestors have thrived for millions of years in the harsh habitat of the intertidal zone—exposed to fluctuating temperatures, high UV radiation, severe salt stress, and desiccation.
Amphibians can develop tolerance to pesticides, but this tolerance can lead to increased susceptibility to parasites, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.
If you lean in for a kiss on the left you may be in the minority. A new study from an international team of psychologists and neuroscientists suggest that humans are hardwired to favour leaning to the right while kissing ...
Although Charles Darwin lived and worked in the 19th century, modern evolutionary biologists are far from exhausting all avenues of inquiry regarding birds and evolution. For example, in the 1990s, researchers such as Russ ...
Those young squirrels now scampering around your neighbourhood were born in this year's earliest litters and are more likely to survive than squirrels born later and still curled up in their nests, according to a new University ...
In evolution, a high sex drive does not always pay off. Female mosquitofish swim away from over-impetuous lovers because they leave them hardly any time to feed and also tend to injure their genitalia more often.
Males produce hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of sperm within a single ejaculate depending on the species. Does it matter then which sperm is actually fertilising the egg?
Why did life on Earth change from small to large when it did? Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have determined how some of the first large organisms, known as rangeomorphs, ...
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Throughout the history of life, new groups of species have flourished at the expense of earlier ones and global biodiversity has varied dramatically over geologic time. A new study led by the University of Turku, Finland, ...
In butterflies, sex is determined by chromosome differences between males and females. But unlike in humans with the familiar X and Y, in butterflies, it is the females that determine the sex of offspring.
The genetic make-up of a willow warbler determines where it will migrate when winter comes. Studies of willow warblers in Sweden, Finland and the Baltic States show that "migration genes" differ - depending on where the birds ...
For the first time, researchers have succeeded in establishing the relationships between 200-million-year-old plants based on chemical fingerprints. Using infrared spectroscopy and statistical analysis of organic molecules ...
The mass extinction that obliterated three-fourths of life on Earth, including non-avian dinosaurs, set the stage for the swift rise of frogs, a new study shows.
Ostriches are the only animals in the world to have a double-kneecap, but its purpose remains an evolutionary mystery. PhD student, Ms Sophie Regnault, from the Royal Veterinary College, UK says "understanding more about ...
When insects skip the light fandango their romantic foreplay often involves some pretty crazy things like hypnotic dance moves and flashy colors. In some species it ends with a complex ejaculate package that does more than ...
When Mark Martindale decided to trace the evolutionary origin of muscle cells, like the ones that form our hearts, he looked in an unlikely place: the genes of animals without hearts or muscles.
Mammals possess several lines of defense against microbes. One of them is activated when receptors called Fprs, which are present on immune cells, bind to specific molecules that are linked to pathogens. Researchers at the ...
How fast does evolution occur? In certain bacteria, it can occur almost instantaneously, a University at Buffalo molecular biologist has discovered.
It's one of the tiniest organisms on Earth, but also one of the most abundant. And now, the microscopic marine bacteria called Prochlorococcus can add one more superlative to its list of attributes: It evolves new kinds of ...
The evolution of the amniotic egg—complete with membrane and shell—was key to vertebrates leaving the oceans and colonizing the land and air. Now, 360 million years later, bird eggs come in all shapes and sizes, from ...
Humans possess many cognitive abilities not seen in other animals, such as a full-blown language capacity as well as reasoning and planning abilities. Despite these differences, however, it has been difficult to identify ...
The common understanding of evolution is that it is a battle for survival: one must either "scrunch or be scrunched," as Nicodemus Boffin, the Dickens' character, famously says.
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers from South Korea, the U.K. and the U.S. has used computational methods to follow chromosomal rearrangements in seven genomes. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy ...
The arrangement of the photoreceptors in our eyes allows us to detect socially significant color variation better than other types of color vision, a team of researchers has found. Specifically, our color vision is superior ...
A promiscuous salamander has found a simple genetic formula for success: Mate with multiple males and use equal parts of each partner's genetic material in her offspring.
Are the red and eastern wolves separate species, or hybrids with coyotes? And what has that got to do with climate change? Actually a lot, in illustrating what scientific inquiry is and what it isn't.
Microbes dominate the planet, especially the ocean, and help support the entire marine food web. In a recent report published in Nature Microbiology, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa (UHM) oceanography professor Ed DeLong ...
In what could be a small step for science potentially leading to a breakthrough, an engineer at Washington University in St. Louis has taken steps toward using nanocrystal networks for artificial intelligence applications.
By combining an FDA-approved cancer immunotherapy with an emerging tumor-roasting nanotechnology, Duke University researchers improved the efficacy of both therapies in a proof-of-concept study using mice.
A new study from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis validates that the central core of the East Antarctic ice sheet should remain stable even if the West Antarctic ice sheet melts.
When Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman first saw a quasicrystal through his microscope in 1982, he reportedly thought to himself, "Eyn chaya kazo"—Hebrew for, "There can be no such creature."
Researchers have discovered a new reaction mechanism that could be used to improve catalyst designs for pollution control systems to further reduce emissions of smog-causing nitrogen oxides in diesel exhaust.
Ignore the snobs, because most experts agree: a few drops of water enhance the taste of whiskies, from well-rounded blends to peat bombs redolent of smoke, tobacco and leather.
The roundworm stars in the first-ever compilation of gene readouts in every kind of cell in an animal. The readouts, which were taken at a particular stage in the worm's life, reveal, for example, which genes are turned on ...
It all began with a bet at a conference in Italy in 2013. Nicolas Vogel, Ph.D., then a postdoctoral fellow in Joanna Aizenberg's lab at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Harvard's ...
Astrophysicists at the University of Texas at Arlington have predicted that an Earth-like planet may be lurking in a star system just 16 light years away.
The earliest introduction of domestic chickens and black rats from Asia to the east coast of Africa came via maritime routes between the 7th and 8th centuries AD. In a paper published August 17, 2017 in the journal PLOS ONE, ...
Life as a fruit fly seems pretty simple: Hatch, grow, eat some fruit, find a mate, produce hundreds of tiny offspring and die—all in a month or so.
Farmers can grow big, juicy tomatoes thanks to a mutation in the Cell Size Regulator gene that occurred during the tomato domestication process. Esther van der Knaap of the University of Georgia, Athens and colleagues describe ...
Bacteria have to watch out for amoeba. Hungry amoebae hunt them: they catch them with their pseudopodia and then absorb and digest them.
Over the last decade, scientists have discovered tiny pieces of plastic in many ocean waters, and even in deep-sea mud. However, they know very little about how microplastics are transported within the ocean. A new paper ...
Spacewalking cosmonauts set free the world's first satellite made almost entirely with a 3-D printer on Thursday.
(Phys.org)—A trio of researchers with Universidad Católica del Norte and the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie has found evidence that suggests that convection alone cannot account for the amount of material that ...
Queen ants spend most of their time having babies. To reign supreme in a colony, they exude a special scent, or pheromone, on the waxy surface of their body that suppresses ovary development in their sisters, rendering the ...
Researchers recently showed that migratory reed warblers depend on an internal geomagnetic map to guide them on their long-distance journeys. But it wasn't clear how the birds were solving the relatively difficult "longitude ...
Researchers at the University of Illinois have discovered a mechanism that allows bacteria of the same species to communicate when their survival is threatened. The study suggests it may be possible to slow dangerous infections ...
Cartilage in our joints contains collagen which behaves a bit like the liquid crystals on a smart phone screen, according to researchers at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).
Researchers have developed a new terahertz imaging approach that, for the first time, can acquire micron-scale resolution images while retaining computational approaches designed to speed up image acquisition. This combination ...
X-rays make the invisible visible: they permit the way materials are structured to be determined all the way down to the level of individual atoms. In the 1950s it was x-rays which revealed the double-helix structure of DNA. ...
A breakthrough 'recipe' for inkjet printing, which could enable high-volume manufacturing of next-generation laser and optoelectronic technologies, has been uncovered by Cambridge researchers.
Using a novel molecular analysis technique, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have identified the chemical underpinnings of Captagon, also known as fenethylline, an illegal amphetamine-type stimulant that ...
The C. elegans roundworm sees by eating, sucking in big gulps of bacteria to learn about its surrounding environment. As researchers watched, they noticed an odd pattern marked by "bursts" of eating.
Researchers say their new knowledge on the inner workings of a bacterium has important implications for Australia's billion dollar cheese industry.
Imagine being able to see the signs of cancer decades before we can now. URI Chemical Engineering Assistant Professor Daniel Roxbury and researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center have invented a technique that ...
A new test to show the properties of biologically important enzymes could help to streamline development of new treatments.
Mexican scientists said Wednesday they have discovered the fossilized remains of a previously unknown species of giant sloth that lived 10,000 years ago and died at the bottom of a sinkhole.
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