Evolution

Male Or Female? 180 Million Years Ago, It Was Less Clear

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?

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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