Evolution

Oceanic Dispersal Drove Blind Snake Evolution

Blindsnakes are one of the few groups of organisms that inhabited Madagascar when it broke from India about 100 million years ago, and continental drift had a profound impact on how the animals evolved, says a new study published in Biology Letters. Called ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 8 2010 - 7:06pm

Stone Age Scandinavians Were Lactose Intolerant

Researchers from Uppsala and Stockholm Universities say that the hunter-gatherers who inhabited the southern coast of Scandinavia 4,000 years ago were lactose intolerant. The conclusion suggests that today's Scandinavians are not descended from the St ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 1 2010 - 12:09pm

why one needs a religion to align or to survive?

Leaving aside those who dont believe in any religion most of the Global population is aligned to 4 or 5 religions mainly based on continents or group of coutries or pursue some kind of mythology or dictats. What makes a man to be fanatic? My question is wh ...

Blog Post - Ashwani Kumar - Apr 1 2010 - 12:22pm

Sunflowers Show How Gene Duplication Generates Diversity

The authors of a new paper in Current Biology say they have found the first concrete evidence that shows how gene duplications can lead to functional diversity in organisms. In the study, researchers examined how duplications of a gene called FLOWERING LOC ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 2 2010 - 11:06am

Plants which do no produce flowers bear seeds on their modified leaves.

During course of evolution ( if you believe in theory of evolution) cycads were once called as living fossil. Most of the plants of this group became extinct and fossil. However when Cycas was discovered from China where it is found on places of worship a ...

Blog Post - Ashwani Kumar - Apr 3 2010 - 12:11pm

Cycas Male plant bears single male cone terminally but here you see two

The botanical garden of Justus Liebig Universitat where I visited with my daughter when she was less than two years old in 1976 for the first time has attracted me again and again. Some of the widest collections of plants are there ...

Blog Post - Ashwani Kumar - Apr 3 2010 - 12:39pm

Form And Function Evolve Separately, Biologists Say

A new study by scientists at the University of Michigan and Taiwan's National Health Research Institutes suggests that the evolution of morphology and physiology are controlled by different genetic mechanisms. The finding that form and function are sh ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 5 2010 - 4:08pm

Transcription Factor Binding Not So Evolutionarily Conserved

Researchers writing in Science have discovered a remarkable amount of plasticity in how transcription factors, the proteins that bind to DNA to control the activation of genes, maintained their function over 300 million years of evolution. They say that se ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 9 2010 - 10:57am

Ribosome Preserves Genetic Code's Evolutionary History

Nearly all life forms rely on the same genetic code to specify the amino acid composition of proteins, but just how individual amino acids were assigned to specific three-letter combinations or codons during the evolution of the genetic code is still subje ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 12 2010 - 3:57pm

Geographical Isolation Doesn't Drive Evolution?

A new study of island lizards suggests that geographical isolation may not be as important to evolution as previously thought. The new research, published in PLoS Genetics, shows that even those lizards that have been geographically isolated for many milli ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 29 2010 - 6:17pm