A team from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) has revealed that by crossing two species of flies, they can use what they learn from the proteome of the hybrid offspring to find new clues about how proteins interact with each other
Modern humans have brains that are more than three times larger than our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. Scientists don't agree on when and how this dramatic increase took place, but new analysis of 94 hominin fossils shows that average brain size increased gradually and consistently over the past three million years.
New York University will host David Kingsley, an evolutionary biologist at Stanford University, for “Fishing for the Secrets of Vertebrate Evolution,” its annual Darwin Lecture, on Friday, Feb. 23.
Duplicate copies of a gene shared by male and female fruit flies have evolved to resolve competing demands between the sexes. New genetic analysis by researchers at the University of Chicago describes how these copies have evolved separate male- and female-specific functions that are crucial to reproduction and fertility.
In a new study, published this week in the journal Current Biology, scientists from UChicago show that some neurons in bird brains form the same kind of circuitry and have the same molecular signature as cells that enable connectivity between different areas of the mammalian neocortex.
Vanderbilt biologist Nicole Creanza takes an interdisciplinary approach to human evolution--both biological and cultural--as editor of special themed issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
Models for extinction risk are necessarily simple. Most reduce complex ecological systems to a linear relationship between resource density and population growth—something that can be broadly applied to infer how much resource loss a species can survive.
The biology teacher's pedagogical toolbox is evolving. Bright colors, replicating computer code and a digital petri dish bring evolution science to life for students.
A large international research team, led by Israel Hershkovitz from Tel Aviv University and including Rolf Quam from Binghamton University, State University of New York, has discovered the earliest modern human fossil ever found outside of Africa. The finding suggests that modern humans left the continent at least 50,000 years earlier than previously thought.
Scientists have long wondered how the horse evolved from an ancestor with five toes to the animal we know today. While it is largely believed that horses simply evolved with fewer digits, researchers at New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine (NYITCOM) pose a new theory that suggests remnants of all five toes are still present within the hooves of the horse.
About 13 million years ago, a distant ancestor of modern apes and humans suffered an untimely death on the arid landscape of northern Kenya. Last year, a Rutgers scientist helped bring its tiny skull to light, filling in a huge gap in the evolutionary record. And on Saturday, members of the public are invited to come face-to-skull with that ancestor, known as “Alesi,” at the Rutgers Geology Museum’s 50th annual Open House event. The museum stands on the College Avenue Campus of Rutgers University–New Brunswick. Admission is free.
A new study reveals that omnivorous New World noctilionoid bats, those species with diets including both plant and animal materials, produce more new species in the long run than specialized vegetarian or insectivorous species.
There are more than 8 million species of living things on Earth, but none of them — from 100-foot blue whales to microscopic bacteria — has an advantage over the others in the universal struggle for existence. In a paper published Jan. 8 in the prestigious journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, scientists describe the dynamic that began with the origin of life on Earth 4 billion years ago.
Mud crabs hide for their lives if blue crabs, which prey upon them, pee anywhere near them. Pinpointing urine compounds for the first time that warn the mud crabs of predatory peril initiates a new level of understanding of how chemicals invisibly regulate undersea wildlife and ecosystems.
Following the chemistry, scientists develop fascinating new theory for how life on Earth may have begun.
New research characterizes jumping behavior in larval midge flies. Even though these larvae are typically restrained during development, they can use a unique physiological mechanism to jump long distances. These results will be presented at the annual conference of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in San Francisco, CA.
New research shows that inflammation was modified by uterine decidual cells to facilitate implantation in placental mammals. The results of this study will be presented at the annual conference of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in San Francisco, CA on January 5, 2018.
Scans of fossilized dinosaur prints show how some dinosaur feet moved not just on top of but through the earth. The results of this study will be presented at the annual conference of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in San Francisco, CA on January 4, 2018
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered how the Pacific midshipman fish can hum continuously for up to an hour in order to attract potential mates. The study, which is featured on the cover of the January 2018 issue of the Journal of General Physiology, explains how the muscle fibers surrounding the fish’s swimbladder can sustain the high rates of contraction—up to 100 times per second—that are needed to produce the animal’s distinctive call.
Researchers at UCLA and the University of Wisconsin–Madison have confirmed that microscopic fossils discovered in a nearly 3.5 billion-year-old piece of rock in Western Australia are the oldest fossils ever found and indeed the earliest direct evidence of life on Earth.
The larvae of the fish that live in coral reefs look alike, making it difficult for marine biologists to study reef populations. Now, Weizmann's Prof. Rotem Sorek found a way to “barcode” 80% of fish species known to visit the reefs in a Red Sea gulf.
Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and President for Academic Affairs at Mount Sinai Health System, has been named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute announces the winning ideas from the entries in the fall 2017 Change the World Challenge.
The Science of Consciousness ('TSC') is an interdisciplinary conference emphasizing broad and rigorous approaches to all aspects of the study and understanding of conscious awareness. Topical areas include neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, language, biology, quantum physics, meditation, altered states, machine consciousness, the nature of reality, culture and experiential phenomenology.
Agriculture and domestic activities consume much of the Colorado River water that once flowed to the Colorado Delta and Northern Gulf of California. The nature and extent of impact of this fresh-water loss on the ecology and fisheries of the Colorado Delta and Gulf of California is controversial. A recent publication in the journal PeerJ reveals a previously unseen risk to the unique local biodiversity of the tidal portion of the Delta.
A gene controlling our biological clocks plays a vital role in regulating human-specific genes important to brain evolution. The findings from the O’Donnell Brain Institute open new paths of research into how CLOCK proteins produced by the CLOCK gene affect brain function and the processes by which neurons find their proper place in the brain.
Using modern research tools on a 155-million-year-old reptile fossil, scientists at Johns Hopkins and the American Museum of Natural History report they have filled in some important clues to the evolution of animals that once roamed land and transitioned to life in the water.
University of Michigan paleontologists conducted a second excavation this week at the Chelsea-area farm where the skull, tusks and dozens of intact bones of an ice age mammoth were pulled from the ground in late 2015.
The varied sex lives of a type of green algae have enabled a University of Adelaide researcher to test a theory of why there are males and females.
With no biological program to drive it, nascent multicellular clusters adopt a lifecycle thanks to the physics of their stresses. The accidental reproduction drives them to evolve as multicellular life.
A team of researchers, including a faculty member and postdoctoral fellow from Washington University in St. Louis, found that oxygen levels appear to increase at about the same time as a three-fold increase in biodiversity during the Ordovician Period, between 445 and 485 million years ago, according to a study published Nov. 20 in Nature Geoscience.
Scientists recently announced the discovery of a fossil that fills a missing evolutionary link—the first known member of the modern bryozoans to grow up into a structure. Called Jablonskipora kidwellae, it is named after UChicago geophysical scientists David Jablonski and Susan Kidwell.
Rural counties continue to rank lowest among counties across the U.S., in terms of health outcomes. A group of national organizations including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National 4-H Council are leading the way to close the rural health gap.
The two teeth are from small, rat-like creatures that lived 145 million years ago in the shadow of the dinosaurs. They are the earliest undisputed fossils of mammals belonging to the line that led to human beings.
Scientists from the University of Chicago analyzed genetic data from a group of swallowtail species to find out when and how mimicry first evolved, and what has been driving those changes since then.
Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found a compound that may have been a crucial factor in the origins of life on Earth.
A new study by an international team of scientists reports an analysis of the incredibly diverse “lost world” of Caribbean fossils that includes dozens of ancient mammals. The study reveals that the arrival of humans throughout the islands was likely the primary cause of the extinction of native mammal species there.
Working with an international team of breeders and genome scientists, plant biologists at the University of Georgia have sequenced the genome of garden asparagus as a model for sex chromosome evolution.
An older Neandertal from about 50,000 years ago, who had suffered multiple injuries and other degenerations, became deaf and must have relied on the help of others to avoid prey and survive well into his 40s, indicates a new analysis published Oct. 20 in the online journal PLoS ONE.
Small RNA molecules originally developed as a tool to study gene function trigger a mechanism hidden in every cell that forces the cell to commit suicide, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study, the first to identify molecules to trigger a fail-safe mechanism that may protect us from cancer.
To mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, NYU's Joshua Tucker talks about communism’s legacy and how the Soviet Union changed the world.
In a paper published in Nature Communications, Christoph Adami, Michigan State University professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, and graduate student Thomas LaBar have provided a look at how certain species survive by evolving a greater ability to weed out harmful mutations – a new concept called “drift robustness”.
Researchers have retrieved original pigment, beta-keratin and muscle proteins from a 54 million-year-old sea turtle hatchling. The work provides direct evidence that a pigment-based survival trait common to modern sea turtles evolved at least 54 million years ago.
Women born by Caesarean section due to a fetopelvic disproportion (FDP) are more than twice as likely to develop FDP when giving birth than women born naturally. This is the conclusion of a study by a team of evolutionary biologists at the University of Vienna headed by Philipp Mitteroecker. Using a mathematical model, the team was able to explain the paradoxical phenomenon that natural selection did not lead to the reduction in the rates of obstructed labour. Empirical data also support that the regular use of C-sections has already triggered an evolutionary increase of FPD rates.
Writing this week (Oct. 9, 2017) in the journal New Phytologist, University of Wisconsin–Madison Professor of Botany Hiroshi Maeda and his colleagues describe an ancient loosening up of a key biochemical pathway that set the stage for the ancestors of beets to develop their characteristic red pigment.
An international team including DOE Joint Genome Institute researchers analyzed the genome sequence of the common liverwort (Marchantia polymorpha) to identify genes and gene families deemed crucial to plant evolution and have been conserved over millions of years and across plant lineages.
The Ph.D. candidate in UTEP’s Ecology and Evolutionary Biology program has discovered three new species of chameleons. The reptile trio, historically thought to be a single species, was found in different parts of the Albertine Rift in Central Africa.
Genes which determine animal complexity – or what makes humans so much more complex than a fruit fly or a sea urchin – have been identified for the first time.
In a step toward bridging the gap between fungal taxonomy and molecular ecology, scientists from several institutions including Los Alamos National Laboratory have characterized a sample of “mystery” fungus collected in North Carolina and found its home in the fungal tree of life.
Weizmann Institute scientists find that including “non-ideal” components in the design may be key to functional artificial proteins
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