(Phys.org) —The humble honeybee may not seem very intelligent at first sight, but recent research has shown that it possesses a surprising degree of sophistication that is not expected in an insect brain. Specifically, ...
(Phys.org) —If you asked a biologist what any given cell is going to do next, they might ask you first to tell them its electrical potential, oxygenation, pH, osmolarity or glucose concentration. Depending on how finely-scaled ...
(Phys.org) —It is generally agreed that the ancestors of modern Native Americans were Asian peoples who migrated to North America from Siberia and Beringia – a region proximate to the Bering Strait, Bering Sea and Chukchi ...
There was considerable fallout, both positive and negative, from our first story covering the radical pig-chimp hybrid theory put forth by Dr. Eugene McCarthy, a geneticist who's proposing that humans first arose from an ...
(Phys.org) —As is the case in all areas of science, our understanding of evolutionary biology is… well, evolving. Two such areas are macroevolution (any evolutionary change at or above the level of species – that is, ...
(Phys.org)—Throughout her career, the famous biologist Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) argued that the world of microorganisms has a much larger impact on the entire biosphere—the world of all living things—than scientists ...
(Phys.org)—Ethologists – those who study animal behavior under natural conditions – have long recognized that groups of various species, or animal collectives, use a variety of decision-making systems. For example, ...
(Phys.org)—Despite evidence that phenotypic change does not always occur uniformly across all species members and lineages, single size or shape traits are often used to represent species-level change in its entirety. Recently, ...
(Phys.org)—Of the many microbes that – like almost all life – require iron, some live in iron-limited environments. What to do? Secrete siderophores, of course: small, high-affinity iron chelating compounds that scavenge ...
(Phys.org)—While some advanced humanoid robots already look eerily lifelike, robots in the future may actually become partly alive. Currently, researchers are working on integrating living cells and other biological components ...
