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Wednesday, 01 September 2010 23:15 |
 In a counter-intuitive finding, new research from North Carolina State University shows that a species of shellfish widely consumed in the Pacific over the past 3,000 years has actually increased in size, despite -- and possibly because of -- increased human activity in the area.
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Wednesday, 01 September 2010 23:11 |
 By describing a new double-clawed and highly-unusual relative of Velociraptor, paleontologists have answered a long-standing question: what did the Late Cretaceous predatory dinosaurs in Europe look like? Balaur bondoc, described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first reasonably complete skeleton of a meat-eating dinosaur from the final 60 million years of the Age of Dinosaurs in Europe and provides insight into an ecosystem very different from that of today.
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Monday, 30 August 2010 23:20 |
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 A new University of Florida study indicates extinct carnivorous mammals shrank in size during a global warming event that occurred 55 million years ago.
The study, scheduled to appear in the December print edition of the Journal of Mammalian Evolution and now available online, describes a new species that evolved to half the size of its ancestors during this period of global warming.
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Monday, 30 August 2010 23:16 |
 A team of UK researchers, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), has publicly released the first sequence coverage of the wheat genome. The release is a step towards a fully annotated genome and makes a significant contribution to efforts to support global food security and to increase the competitiveness of UK farming.
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Saturday, 28 August 2010 02:19 |
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 Scientists at Harvard University have sketched a new map of the "evolutionary labyrinth" species must traverse to reach eusociality, the rare but spectacularly successful social structure where individuals cooperate to raise offspring.
Mathematical biologists Martin A. Nowak and Corina E. Tarnita and evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson present their work this week in the journal Nature.
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Saturday, 28 August 2010 02:05 |
 The cave bear started to become extinct in Europe 24,000 years ago, but until now the cause was unknown. An international team of scientists has analysed mitochondrial DNA sequences from 17 new fossil samples, and compared these with the modern brown bear. The results show that the decline of the cave bear started 50,000 years ago, and was caused more by human expansion than by climate change.
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Wednesday, 25 August 2010 17:01 |
 A new University of Florida study indicates extinct carnivorous mammals shrank in size during a global warming event that occurred 55 million years ago.
The study, scheduled to appear in the December print edition of the Journal of Mammalian Evolution and now available online, describes a new species that evolved to half the size of its ancestors during this period of global warming.
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Wednesday, 25 August 2010 16:46 |
 If you had a dinner invitation in Utah's Escalante Valley almost 10,000 years ago, you would have come just in time to try a new menu item: mush cooked from the flour of milled sage brush seeds.
After five summers of meticulous excavation, Brigham Young University archaeologists are beginning to publish what they've learned from the "North Creek Shelter." It's the oldest known site occupied by humans in the southern half of Utah and one of only three such archaeological sites state-wide that date so far back in time.
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Tuesday, 24 August 2010 07:15 |
 Some of the nation's most historic buildings and monuments may be better protected from decay in future, following a development by engineers.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have devised a method of forecasting damage caused by the weather to stone buildings -- including statues, monuments and other historic sites, as well as modern masonry buildings.
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Tuesday, 24 August 2010 03:09 |
 Falsely advertising one's fighting ability might seem like a good strategy for a wimp who wants to come off as a toughie, but in paper wasp societies, such deception is discouraged through punishment, experiments at the University of Michigan suggest.
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Wednesday, 01 September 2010 23:13 |
 Community feasting is one of the most universal and important social behaviors found among humans. Now, scientists have found the earliest clear evidence of organized feasting, from a burial site dated about 12,000 years ago. These remains represent the first archaeological verification that human feasting began before the advent of agriculture.
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Wednesday, 01 September 2010 23:09 |
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 Less-pretty female house sparrows tend to lower their aim when selecting a mate. Addressing the lack of studies on condition-dependency of female mate choice, researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology found that female sparrows of a low quality prefer males of an equally low quality.
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Monday, 30 August 2010 23:18 |
 Scientists have finally sequenced the entire genome of an ant, actually two very different species of ant, and the insights gleaned from their genetic blueprints are already yielding tantalizing clues to the extraordinary social behavior of ants.
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Monday, 30 August 2010 23:15 |
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A unique experiment at Rice University that forces bacteria into a head-to-head competition for evolutionary dominance has yielded new insights about the way Darwinian selection plays out at the molecular level. An exacting new analysis of the experiment has revealed precisely how specific genetic mutations impart a physical edge in the competition for survival.
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Saturday, 28 August 2010 02:07 |
 A new study of the High Arctic climate roughly 50 million years ago led by the University of Colorado at Boulder helps to explain how ancient alligators and giant tortoises were able to thrive on Ellesmere Island well above the Arctic Circle, even as they endured six months of darkness each year.
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Saturday, 28 August 2010 02:04 |
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If you think that your favorite coffee shop is a great gathering place for discussion, you should have been around in the Ottoman Empire starting in the 1550s. A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research examines the role of coffee houses in the evolution of the consumer.
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Wednesday, 25 August 2010 16:58 |
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The Galton-Darwin-Wedgwood pedigree, first exhibited in 1932, has been found in the archives of Truman State University.
A poster of the Galton-Darwin-Wedgwood pedigree was prepared by Harry Hamilton Laughlin, Director of the Eugenics Record Office of the Carnegie Institute, and exhibited at the Third International Congress of Eugenics in 1932 at the American Museum of Natural History.
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Wednesday, 25 August 2010 16:44 |
 More than two and a half billion years ago, Earth differed greatly from our modern environment, specifically in respect to the composition of gases in the atmosphere and the nature of the life forms inhabiting its surface. While today's atmosphere consists of about 21 percent oxygen, the ancient atmosphere contained almost no oxygen. Life was limited to unicellular organisms. The complex eukaryotic life we are familiar with -- animals, including humans -- was not possible in an environment devoid of oxygen.
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Tuesday, 24 August 2010 07:14 |
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In prehistoric times farmers across the world domesticated wild plants to create an agricultural revolution. As a result the ancestral plants have been lost, causing problems for anyone studying the domestication process of modern-day varieties, but that might change. A team led by Fabiola Parra at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) has managed to trace a domesticated cactus, the Gray Ghost Organ Pipe (Stenocereus pruinosus) to its living ancestor that can still be found in the Tehuacán Valley in Mexico.
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Tuesday, 24 August 2010 03:07 |
 In "The Sign of the Four" Sherlock Holmes tells Watson he has written a monograph on 140 forms of cigar-, cigarette-, and pipe-tobacco, "with colored plates illustrating the difference in the ash." He finds the ash invaluable for the identification of miscreants who happen to smoke during the commission of a crime.
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