The evolution of worms, insects, vertebrates and other “bilateral” animals — those with distinct left and right sides — from less complex creatures like jellyfish and sea anemones with “radial” symmetry may have been facilitated by the emergence of a completely new “operating…
You might expect that a term like “monsoon” has an agreed definition and that scientists can explain when it starts and ends. Defining the monsoon is actually quite contentious, leading to the publication of many different definitions. Some define the monsoon onset according to rainfall, wind change, cloud top…
How this wrist bone development happened has been the subject of much debate, with substantial disagreement between developmental biologists, who study how the wings of modern birds develop in the growing embryo, and palaeontologists who study the bones of dinosaurs and early birds. A resolution to this impasse is now…
New findings by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, suggest that an evolutionary arms race between rival elements within the genomes of primates drove the evolution of complex regulatory networks that orchestrate the activity of genes in every cell of our bodies. The arms race is between mobile DNA…
Massive galaxies in the Universe have stopped making their own stars and are instead snacking on nearby galaxies, according to research by Australian scientists. Astronomers looked at more than 22,000 galaxies and found that while smaller galaxies are very efficient at creating stars from gas, the most massive galaxies…
As scientists catalog the trillions of bacteria found in every nook and cranny of the human body, a new look by the University of Michigan shows wide variation in the types of bacteria found in healthy people. Based on their findings in today’s Nature, there is no single healthy microbiome or microbe community.…
Astronomers using data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Kepler Space Telescope have discovered clear skies and steamy water vapour on a planet outside our Solar System. The planet, known as HAT-P-11b, is about the size of Neptune, making it the smallest exoplanet ever on…
The first comprehensive map of hummingbirds’ 22-million-year-old family tree — reconstructed based on careful analysis of 284 of the world’s 338 known species — tells a story of rapid and ongoing diversification. The decade-long study reported in the Cell Press journalCurrent Biology on April 3…
In an effort to understand the molecular basis of adaptation in vertebrates, researchers sequenced the genomes and transcriptomes of five species of African cichlid fishes. A research team led by scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard uncovered a variety of features in the cichlid genomes that enabled…
Today’s sloths might be known as slow, small animals, but their ancestors developed large body sizes at an amazing rate, according to an evolutionary reconstruction published in the open access journalBMC Evolutionary Biology. The fast rate of change suggests that factors such as environmental conditions, or…
