Evolution

The Y chromosome is an established evolutionary tool and has been used in many evolutionary studies. While easy to use, it has limitations which prevent it from full utilization about the most…

I've written this post to address some of the issues raised in the comments to my first post on the evolution versus creationism debate.   (1) A major reason that Biblical creationism…

In May, Nature magazine published a draft sequence of the entire genome of the platypus, the bizarre mammal endemic of Australia that is so strange looking that the first scientists who received a…

One copy of the human genome is more than 3 billion nucleotides in length, and weighs in at about 3.5 picograms (pg, or trillionths of a gram). Only about 1.5% of this is composed of our 20,000 or…

Once considered a barren plain dotted with hydrothermal vents, the seafloor's rocky regions appear to be teeming with microbial life, say scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (…

The description of an ancient amphibian that millions of years ago swam in quiet pools and caught mayflies on the surrounding land in Texas has set to rest one of the greatest current controversies…

I’m reading a delightful history of chess, The Immortal Game, by David Shenk, and got to the chapter dealing with the dark side of chess: the fact that a small but significant number of top…

"The placenta is this amazing, complex structure and it's unique to mammals, but we've had no idea what its evolutionary origins are," says Julie Baker, PhD, assistant professor of genetics at…

In research published in Nature, researchers at Rockefeller University and the University of Tokyo state that insects have adopted a strategy to detect odors that is radically different from those of…

Nice blog today on mutualisms by Olivia Judson who writes the Wild Side blog/column for the New York Times (I seem to be writing a lot about writers for the NY Times these days ... not sure what is…