Evolution

Autocatalytic Network: A Step Closer To Creating Artificial Living Systems

How did life originate? And can scientists create life? These questions have always occupied philosophers and scientists interested in the origin of life, and they impact technology of the future also. If we can create artificial living systems, we may no ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 20 2014 - 12:30pm

Florida Lizards Evolve Within 20 Generations

Scientists have documented the rapid evolution of a native lizard species as a result of pressure from an invading lizard species introduced from Cuba.  After contact with the invasive species, the native lizards began perching higher in trees, and, gener ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 26 2014 - 1:19pm

Ebola's Evolutionary Roots Are Ancient

Though Ebola tends to occur in waves, the filoviruses family to which Ebola and its lethal relative Marburg belong, are at least 16 million years old. Filoviruses likely existed in the Miocene Epoch, and at that time, the evolutionary lines leading to Ebo ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 24 2014 - 1:30pm

Homo Floresiensis: Hobbit Species Continues To Provoke Questions About Human Evolution

By Sarah King, Genetic Literacy Project Since the discovery in 2004 of Homo floresiensis, an ancient hominid nicknamed “Flo” and also “hobbit”, after the diminutive villagers from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, due to her small size relative ...

Article - Genetic Literacy ... - Oct 29 2014 - 12:53pm

The Way Architecture Imitates Life, Biology Meets Geometry

Biology can be inspirational.  The spiral ramps in multistory parking garages, the way they are stacked and connecting parallel levels, are replications of helical structures found in a ubiquitous membrane structure in the cells of the body- Terasaki ramp ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 30 2014 - 5:06pm

Location, Location, Location: A Real Estate Axiom For The Genesis Of Genitalia

Nature enjoys variety, that is why it seems like evolution must have been drinking during the creation of some of the crazier things in biology.  There is no intelligent reason why snakes and lizards have two genitalia while birds and people have one- or ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 5 2014 - 3:15pm

Genetics Show How Earliest Europeans Weathered The Last Ice Age

Scientists believe that Eurasians separated into at least three populations around 36,000 years ago: Europeans,Asians and a mystery third lineage, all whose descendants would develop the unique features of most non-African peoples after interbreeding with ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 7 2014 - 8:30am

What Cute Koalas Tell Us About The Origins Of The Human Genome

8 percent of our genome derives from retroviruses that inserted themselves into human sex cells millions of years ago and right now the koala retrovirus (KoRV) is invading koala genomes. Koalas are the only known organism where a retrovirus is transitionin ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 10 2014 - 9:01am

The Insect Tree Of Life

The 1KITE project (1,000 Insect Transcriptome Evolution) seeks to understand the millions of living insect species that shape our terrestrial living space and both support and threaten our natural resources by analyzing more than 1,000 insect transcriptome ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 10 2014 - 11:02am

It Takes Two: How Mutualisms Evolve In A World Of Selfish Genes

The bobtail squid and bioluminscent bacteria are just one of hundreds of examples of mutualism. Klaus Stiefel /Flickr, CC BY-NC By Alex Jordan, University of Texas at Austin ...

Article - The Conversation - Nov 13 2014 - 6:34pm