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Evolution news
Global warming is driving rapid evolutionary response in fruit flies, research suggests
Researchers from the UAB have observed that the rise in temperatures and episodes of heat waves in the past two decades has accelerated the presence of genetic variations that increase tolerance to high temperatures in populations ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 13, 2024
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An evolutionary battleground: Plants vs. microbes
Gazing out on a freshwater pond, you may see tiny green plants with oval-shaped leaves floating in clusters. In overgrown ponds, these plants coat the water's surface. These plants—called duckweed or water lentils—can ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 12, 2024
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New fossil fish species scales up evidence of Earth's evolutionary march
Climate change and asteroids are linked with animal origin and extinction—and plate tectonics also seems to play a key evolutionary role, "groundbreaking" new fossil research reveals.
Evolution
Sep 12, 2024
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38
Long stems on flowers are an adaptation that encourages bat pollination, research suggests
Flowers that are pollinated by bats tend to have long stems that make them stand out from the surrounding foliage. New research published in New Phytologist reveals the evolutionary advantage that this characteristic provides ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 11, 2024
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Multiple ways to evolve tiny knee bone could have helped humans walk upright
The evolution of bones in primates' knees could have implications for how humans evolved to walk upright, a new study has found.
Evolution
Sep 10, 2024
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111
New Zealand's kākāpō developed different feather colors to evade predatory birds, genome sequencing shows
Aotearoa New Zealand's flightless parrot, the kākāpō, evolved two different color types to potentially help them avoid detection by a now-extinct apex predator, Lara Urban at Helmholtz AI, Germany and colleagues from the ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 10, 2024
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69
How the butterfly got its pupa: Modeling study traces origins of complete metamorphosis
A research team of scientists from Freie Universität Berlin and Princeton University has provided insights into the origins of complete metamorphosis in insects.
Plants & Animals
Sep 10, 2024
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43
Neolithic bones reveal isolated Yersinia pestis infections, not pandemics
Since the catastrophic pandemics of the Middle Ages, one disease has almost proverbially symbolized contagion and death: the plague. It is now known that the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis has been present in Central and ...
Evolution
Sep 6, 2024
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83
New book takes philosophical approach to deep time
Contemporary life is rife with talk of impending apocalypse, from the plots of countless books and movies to the increasingly grim predictions associated with climate change.
Evolution
Sep 6, 2024
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43
Role of long noncoding RNAs in skin provides important insights for evolution
A study has shown that a type of non-coding RNA molecule could play a role in the development of skin diseases—like eczema or psoriasis—and highlights an important molecular mechanism for driving genetic evolution.
Evolution
Sep 6, 2024
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46
Islands are engines of linguistic diversity, study shows
Islands drive language change and generate language diversity in similar ways to how they drive species diversity, according to research from The Australian National University (ANU) that analyzed languages from over 13,000 ...
Evolution
Sep 6, 2024
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29
Plant thermogenesis has played key role in attracting pollinating insects for at least 200 million years, study suggests
Thermogenesis is a process by which organisms generate internal heat. Although it is usually associated with animals, some plants have also developed this ability. This metabolic process allows certain parts of the plant, ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 6, 2024
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144
Unraveling the evolutionary secrets of how whales and dolphins adapted their backbones for aquatic life
If you've ever seen a dolphin swim, you may have wondered why they undulate their bodies up and down when swimming, instead of side to side as fishes do. Though they have a fishlike body, cetaceans (a group comprised of whales, ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 5, 2024
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Agriculture accelerated human genome evolution to capture energy from starchy foods, study suggests
Over the past 12,000 years, humans in Europe have dramatically increased their ability to digest carbohydrates, expanding the number of genes they have for enzymes that break down starch from an average of eight to more than ...
Evolution
Sep 4, 2024
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Experimental evolution study shows how microbial cooperation can emerge
Max Planck scientists in Marburg have used a synthetic microbial community to study the gradual evolution of mutualism. The study demonstrates for the first time in detail how an evolutionary loss of independence can occur ...
Evolution
Sep 4, 2024
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122
Fungus gnat entombed in a 40-million-year-old piece of amber is a rare gem
A Danish amber collector's find upon a wild North Sea shore in the 1960's has proved to be of great and surprising significance. After having thoroughly examined the roughly 40-million-year-old piece of amber, University ...
Evolution
Aug 30, 2024
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154
Tuberculosis under the sea: A marine sponge microbe provides insights into the bacterium's evolution
The surprising discovery of a bacterium in a marine sponge from the Great Barrier Reef with striking similarity to Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the pathogen responsible for tuberculosis (TB), could unlock and inform future ...
Evolution
Aug 29, 2024
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Larger ant colonies drive the evolution of worker castes: Division of labor is key to life's complexity, says study
Just like human societies, ant societies have a division of labor. Within a colony, some individuals feed the young while others are soldiers who protect the colony from intruders. New research across 794 ant species, published ...
Evolution
Aug 29, 2024
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Lessons learned from Pennsylvania's rare chickadee 'hybrid zone' can now be accessed by students worldwide
In the hybrid zone that encompasses the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania, the habitats of the Carolina Chickadee and the Black-capped Chickadee converge, creating an opportunity for the different species to cross-breed and produce ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 28, 2024
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From smooth and button-size to spiky and giant-size, why are cacti so diverse?
Cacti are among the most diverse plants, from the giant saguaro cactus that can grow up to 18 meters in height, all the way down to the tiny button cactus which is a few centimeters tall. A new study by the Milner Centre ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 28, 2024
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Other news
Genomics reveals sled dogs' Siberian lineage
Tech billionaire returns to Earth after first private spacewalk
Earth to have new mini-moon for two months
Astronomers discover new planet in Great Bear constellation
Generating spin currents directly using ultrashort laser pulses
Research points to a potential new ally in the fight against plant pathogens
Hawk-eyed photographer snaps threatened bird feared lost
How bacteria actively use passive physics to make biofilms
Proteins involved in regulating the cell membrane could lead to new treatments
Chemical imaging method holds promise for separate overlapping fingerprints
