327 Articles with the topic: Evolutionary Biology
Candy cane strategy sweetens life for goldenrods
annatto submitted, created time 1 week 1 day (www.sciencenews.org)
A recent study shows that plants can duck their heads--well, their tips--a bit like a bent candy cane. While this doesn't make them agile enough to literally dodge attackers, it does reduce the amount of damage that they can do. 
Researchers find the first vertebrate eye to use mirror instead of lens
sea-maid submitted, created time 2 weeks 1 day (www.newscientist.com)
The deep sea is full of surprises, and the four-eyed spookfish is up there with the best of them. It is the first vertebrate found with eyes that use mirrors, rather than a lens, to focus light.
Fossilized arachnids made silk but not webs
Darkfrog submitted, created time 2 weeks 1 day (www.nature.com)
Now here's a randomly cool one. Modern spiders use silk for more than just those webs that we love to photograph with dew all over them. They also wrap prey, wrap eggs, line their burrows and cast the strands upward to catch the wind and travel.
Now, it's not clear exactly what these ancient proto-spiders used their silks for, but we can tell that they lack spinnerets, so they would not have had the fine control of today's spiders. Also unlike today's spiders, they had small, one-millimeter tails
Snails and humans use same genes to tell right from left
piggy submitted, created time 2 weeks 3 days (www.eurekalert.org)
Biologists have tracked down genes that control the handedness of snail shells, and they turn out to be similar to the genes used by humans to set up the left and right sides of the body.
The finding, reported online in advance of publication in Nature by University of California, Berkeley, researchers, indicates that the same genes have been responsible for establishing the left-right asymmetry of animals for 500-650 million years, originating in the last common ancestor of all animals with bilateral body organization, creatures that include everything from worms to humans
Dinosaur Dads Took Care of the Nest
sea-maid submitted, created time 2 weeks 6 days (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)
The movie Jurassic Park gave advanced, birdlike dinosaurs a fearsome reputation--swift, intelligent, and deadly. Now it turns out that they had a softer side. Researchers report that males in three species were stay-at-home dads that incubated the eggs in their nests.
Life's original ancestor was LUCA, not Adam nor Eve
piggy submitted, created time 3 weeks 20 hours (www.eurekalert.org)
Here's another argument against intelligent design. An evolutionary geneticist from the Université de Montréal, together with researchers from the French cities of Lyon and Montpellier, have published a ground-breaking study that characterizes the common ancestor of all life on earth, LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor). Their findings, presented in a recent issue of Nature, show that the 3.8-billion-year-old organism was not the creature usually imagined.
The study changes ideas of early life on Earth. "It is generally believed that LUCA was a heat-loving or hyperthermophilic organism
Ancient Insect Hails from Sunken Island
sea-maid submitted, created time 3 weeks 1 day (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)
Which came first: the tree lobster or the island? You may not have been asking that odd question, but researchers have nonetheless answered it with a report indicating that one species of this flightless insect is apparently older than its native home, Lord Howe Island off the coast of Australia. The find suggests that the bug originally evolved on an older island, one now submerged under the Pacific Ocean.
Stretching up to thirteen centimeters long, tree lobsters look like a cross between a grasshopper and a cockroach
Epigenetics: Study identifies the genes and epigenetic factors that make hybrids infertile
Darkfrog submitted, created time 3 weeks 6 days (www.nature.com)
Geneticists out of the Czech Republic's Academy of Sciences have identified the gene that makes hybrids infertile. They're calling it Prdm9. This is the first time that such a gene has been identified in mammals. (Fruit flies are known to have comparable genes.)
One of the definitions of a species is a group of organisms that can reproduce and create fertile young. The offspring of say, a horse and a donkey or a lion and a tiger tend to be sterile. (Polar bears and grizzly bears produce non-sterile hybrids, so many teachers add the caveat "in the wild
Discovery of Lentivirus in Lemur Could Shed Light on History of AIDS and HIV
piggy submitted, created time 1 month 6 days (www.sciencedaily.com)
The genome of a squirrel-sized, saucer-eyed lemur from Madagascar may help scientists understand how HIV-like viruses coevolved with primates, according to new research from the Stanford University School of Medicine. The discovery, to be published online on Dec. 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could provide insight into why non-human primates don't get AIDS and lead to treatments for humans.
Scientists have long believed that lentiviruses — the family of viruses that includes HIV — started infecting primates within the past million years
Did lack of comet impacts help life evolve?
sea-maid submitted, created time 1 month 1 week (www.newscientist.com)
IT SEEMS we got off lightly in the cosmic lottery. Deadly comet impacts may be much rarer in our solar system than in others nearby.
Terrapins exposed! Nature writes about turtles before the shells.
Darkfrog submitted, created time 1 month 1 week (www.nature.com)
I particularly like the artist's depiction of the turtle ancestors. Even if, like most so many such drawings, it later proves to be inaccurate, it is a nice, vivid rendering. I particularly like that it shows the turtles as flexible, able to bend their bodies and necks. If I had to guess how this picture would turn out to be inaccurate, I'd say it's the heads. They're drawn with modern, meant-to-be-pulled-in turtle heads.
The search for genome dark matter
sea-maid submitted, created time 1 month 2 weeks (www.nature.com)
An almost complete catalog of human genetic variation could be available by the end of 2009, thanks to a massive genome sequencing project that includes academic and industrial partners around the world.
The 1000 Genomes Project [sic] has already compiled about 3.8 trillion bases, and this information should be deposited in NIH's GenBank before two months have passed. However, they're not going to stop there
Simple Eyes of Only Two Cells Guide Marine Zooplankton to the Light
piggy submitted, created time 1 month 2 weeks (www.sciencedaily.com)
Researchers unravel how the very first eyes in evolution might have worked and how they guide the swimming of marine plankton towards light.
Larvae of marine invertebrates – worms, sponges, jellyfish - have the simplest eyes that exist. They consist of no more than two cells: a photoreceptor cell and a pigment cell. These minimal eyes, called eyespots, resemble the "proto-eyes" suggested by Charles Darwin as the first eyes to appear in animal evolution. They cannot form images but allow the animal to sense the direction of light
Simple Brain Mechanisms Explain Arbitrary Human Visual Decisions
piggy submitted, created time 1 month 4 weeks (www.sciencedaily.com)
Mark Twain, a skeptic of the idea of free will, argues in his essay "What Is Man?" that humans do not command their minds or the opinions they form. "You did not form that [opinion]," a speaker identified as "old man" says in the essay. "Your [mental] machinery did it for you—automatically and instantly, without reflection or the need of it."
Twain's views get a boost this week from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and University of Chieti, Italy
sea-maid submitted, created time 2 months 42 minutes (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)
As close as humans are to chimpanzees, why do they dodge some diseases that afflict us? And why are we different on so many other levels? A new study that compares genomes from more humans and chimps than ever before suggests that these and other variations might stem from extra or missing copies of key genes.
Although small genetic mutations often receive top billing as the drivers of evolution, the new study focuses on entire genes that are deleted or duplicated, so-called copy number variants (CNVs)
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