Evolution

No Saccharine: How Hummingbirds Evolved To Detect Sugar

If you capture a hummingbird on high-speed video and slow it down, their wings thrum like helicopter blades as they hover near food. Their hearts beat 20 times a second and their tongues dart 17 times a second to slurp from a feeding station. ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 23 2014 - 3:00pm

Extreme Life, Half A Mile Beneath The Antarctic Ice Sheet

Humans don't want to live above the West Antarctic ice sheet but microbes can certainly live below it, according to a new study. Even half a mile below it. The waters and sediments of a lake 2,600 feet beneath the surface of the West Antarctic ice sh ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 23 2014 - 8:00am

3 Papers Discuss The Molecular Toolkits We Share With Flies And Worms

Although separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, flies, worms, and humans share ancient patterns of gene expression and it's all in our genomic data. Three related studies in Nature, tell a similar story: even though humans, worms, a ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 29 2014 - 9:14am

Non-Adaptive Evolution In Cicada Gut: 2 Genomes Function As 1

Organisms in a symbiotic relationship will often shed genes as they come to rely on the other organism for crucial functions but researchers have uncovered an unusual event in which a bacterium that lives in a type of cicada split into two species- doubli ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 28 2014 - 1:37pm

How Wild Rabbits Genetically Became Tame Ones

Why wild animals genetically changed into domesticated forms has long been a mystery, covered by the blanket artificial selection reasoning. A new paper in Science says that many genes controlling the development of the brain and the nervous system were p ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 29 2014 - 11:41am

Synapsids Push Evolutionary Origin Of Nocturnality In Mammals Back 100 Million Years

Most living mammals are nocturnal and it has long been thought that the transition to nocturnality occurred at about the same time as mammals evolved, around 200 million years ago. That hypothesis was based on features such as the large brains of mammals ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 3 2014 - 8:38pm

No Common Ancestor: How Caffeine Evolved In Coffee

The coffee plant has a newly sequenced genome and that can tell scientists what they really want to know about: the evolution of caffeine. The sequences and positions of genes in the coffee plant show that they evolved independently from genes with simila ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 7 2014 - 1:15pm

A Tale of Two Mushrooms

In 1986, an expedition off the South-East coast of Australia near Tasmania, from depths of between 400 and 1,000 metres, brought up some jelly-like creatures, which were seen to be unusual and immediately preserved in ethanol. Now they have been examined, ...

Blog Post - Robert H Olley - Sep 4 2014 - 6:48pm

Whale Sex: It's All In The Hips

New whale research has turned a long-accepted evolutionary assumption on its...hips. Instead of  being just vestigial, whale pelvic bones play a key role in reproduction, according to a new study. Both whales and dolphins have pelvic (hip) bones, evolution ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 8 2014 - 9:33am

Gibbon Genome And The Fast Karyotype Evolution Of Small Apes

Gibbons are small, tree-living apes from Southeast Asia, many species of which are endangered. They are part of the same superfamily as humans and great apes, but sit on the divide between Old-World monkeys and the great apes. These creatures have several ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 10 2014 - 5:06pm