Evolution
- Male Or Female? 180 Million Years Ago, It Was Less Clear
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Man or woman? Male or female? Modern sociological woo about gender aside, in humans and other mammals, the difference between the sexes depends on one single element of the genome: the Y chromosome. It is present only in males, where the two sexual chromo ...
Article - News Staff - Apr 23 2014 - 10:00pm
- In The Ancient Ocean, Did Metabolism Precede The Origin Of Life?
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A new report in Molecular Systems Biology speculates about how primitive cells learned to synthesize their organic components – the molecules that form RNA, lipids and amino acids. The paper also suggests an order for the sequence of events that led to th ...
Article - News Staff - Apr 25 2014 - 12:04pm
- Fish Fry: Evolutionary Clues In Electric Fish
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Take a muscle cell, modify it over millions of years, and you can end up with a shocking evolutionary result: the electric fish. Electric fish have evolved several times in varying levels of complexity. Two groups of electric fish, one in Africa (Mormyroi ...
Article - News Staff - Apr 29 2014 - 9:30pm
- Evolving By Shrinking: How Dinosaurs Became Birds
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Most dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago but one dinosaur lineage survived and lives on today – we call these the birds and they rule the skies the way they once ruled land. An international team, led by scientists from Oxford University and the ...
Article - News Staff - May 6 2014 - 7:55pm
- The Genetic Basis Of Evolved Resistance To GMO Cotton In India
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An international team has discovered what happens on a molecular basis to insects that evolved resistance to genetically modified cotton plants. Their findings shed light on how the global caterpillar pest called pink bollworm overcomes biotech cotton, w ...
Article - News Staff - May 19 2014 - 5:28pm
- Does The Red Queen Hypothesis Makes Species Resilient?
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In Lewis Carroll's 1871 classic novel Through the Looking Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice: "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." Over the years, evolutionary biologists have used the Red Quee ...
Article - News Staff - May 20 2014 - 5:30pm
- Global Warming Could Influence The Gender Of Offspring
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Whether an insect will have a male or female offspring depends on the weather and temperature, according to a study led by Joffrey Moiroux and Jacques Brodeur of the University of Montreal's Department of Biological Sciences. As part of this study, w ...
Article - News Staff - May 21 2014 - 10:18pm
- Sorry Aussies, You Don't Get Credit For The Kiwi
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Sorry Australia, you can no longer lay claim to the origins of the iconic New Zealand kiwi- the kiwi's closest relative is not the emu. Instead, the diminutive kiwi is most closely related to the extinct Madagascan elephant bird – a 2-3 meter tall, ...
Article - News Staff - May 22 2014 - 7:30pm
- Brains And Brawn: Survival Of The Fittest Often Required Both
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Though we share superficial physical similarities, the cognitive differences between humans and our closest living cousins, the chimpanzees, are obvious- we metaphorically throw feces at each other while they do it literally. We have been able to use our ...
Article - News Staff - May 27 2014 - 5:30pm
- The Importance Of Gene Flow In Plant Evolution- How It Changed Over Time
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If you are an organic farmer, you may be worried your crops can be "contaminated" by a field genetically modified with a gene to express a natural toxin against pests. Nasty weeds sometimes evolve directly from natural crosses between domesticat ...
Article - News Staff - May 28 2014 - 9:16am