Evolution

Whether an insect will have a male or female offspring depends on the weather and temperature, according to a study led by Joffrey Moiroux and Jacques Brodeur of the University of Montreal's…

In Lewis Carroll's 1871 classic novel Through the Looking Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice: "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." Over the years,…

An international team has discovered what happens on a molecular basis to insects that evolved resistance to genetically modified cotton plants.  Their findings shed light on how the global…

Most dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago but one dinosaur lineage survived and lives on today – we call these the birds and they rule the skies the way they once ruled land.  An…

Take a muscle cell, modify it over millions of years, and you can end up with a shocking evolutionary result: the electric fish. Electric fish have evolved several times in varying levels of…

A new report in Molecular Systems Biology speculates about how primitive cells learned to synthesize their organic components – the molecules that form RNA, lipids and amino acids. The paper also…

Man or woman? Male or female? Modern sociological woo about gender aside, in humans and other mammals, the difference between the sexes depends on one single element of the genome: the Y…

We are all familiar with the Mafia. In China, it is the Triads, in Italy it is La Cosa Nostra. You pay for protection or disaster is sure to befall you. It happens in the bird world too, according to…

Without knowing it, organisms search for the next “winning” strategy in evolution. Mutation plays a key role in the evolution of new, and sometimes successful, traits. It's a lot like rock-paper-…

A new paper suggests that genes evolve more rapidly in species containing germ plasm, which challenges a long held belief about the way certain species of vertebrates evolved.  The…