Today I gave my lecture on mammal diversity and evolution in the 4th year vertebrate course. We have been talking a fair bit about
paraphyletic groups, common vs. scientific names, and so on. Within this context, we explored the issue of whether we're "descended from monkeys", by taking a look at a phylogeny of relevant primates:
An article in LiveScience entitled "
Evolution Can't Go Backward" has highlighted an experiment done to determine whether a protein could be "unmutated" (i.e. returned to its original state) and regain its ancestral functions.
The results indicated that this reversibility wasn't possible because of other mutational factors that occurred during the entire time interval rendering a return to a primordial form impossible
1.
This does raise an interesting question and suggests some possible misunderstandings about what this actually means.
A few years ago, I was spending a good bit of my time on context-based services. User context — also called “presence” — is information, which changes over time, about the current state of a user or other thing (it could be a car, say, or a sensor, or a computer system; the presence people call it a “presentity”).
The moon has no has no atmosphere like Earth's but oxygen which can be used for people, growing food, creating water and even burning rocket fuel is trapped in its soil.
Antioxidants are a big buzzword these days - everyone claims to have them and that impresses buyers but most don't really know what that means.
Health conscious people know that taking antioxidants to reduce the levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS) - ions or very small molecules that include free radicals - in blood can prevent the DNA damage done by free radicals, which are the result of oxidative stress. What fewer people know is that excessive use of antioxidants depletes their immune systems.
Patterns of brain activity allow researchers to know what number a person has just seen or how many dots a person has been presented with, according to a report published in Current Biology.
The findings confirm the notion that numbers are encoded in the brain via detailed and specific activity patterns and open the door to more sophisticated exploration of humans' high-level numerical abilities. Although "number-tuned" neurons have been found in monkeys, scientists hadn't managed to get any farther than particular brain regions before now in humans.
If you learn a foreign language when you are young but the exposure to that language is brief and you don't get to hear or practice it subsequently, does the neglected language fade away from our memory?
Yes, forgetting is forgetting, has been the belief ... you 'use it or lose it' ... but language learning may instead be more like 'riding a bike' and even a "forgotten" language may be more deeply engraved in our minds than we realize.
European-tasting wines from American species and cultivars? It could happen, say German researchers who have unraveled an unexpected twist in grapevine DNA.
Acoelomorpha, a collection of worms which comprises roughly 350 species, is part of a much larger group called bilateral animals, which are organisms that have symmetrical body forms and include humans, insects and worms. Apparently there has been a question about acoelomorpha, namely where do they fit in taxonomically?
Acoelomorpha has been a "rogue animal," says Casey Dunn, an evolutionary biologist at Brown University. "It has been wandering throughout the animal tree of life."
(?!?)
Hormone therapy treatmenbt for men with advanced prostate cancer has been associated with an increased chance of developing various heart problems but some choices of therapy are less risky than others.
