Lake Mendota in Wisconsin is transformed by the changing seasons – covered by ice in winter, and by algae in summer – and a new study shows how these cyclical shifts are putting the lake’s bacteria into evolutionary loops. Led by researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, the team behind the study analyzed […]
Twins have been rare in human history and for that reason can seem special. Many cultures associate twins with health and vitality, while others see them as a philosophical reminder of the duality of life and death, good and evil. Some famous twins are credited with the birth of nationsothers are described as deities. Our […]
Timetree of 455 species of primates. Images from phylopic.org. Credit: Craig et al., 2024. In a new article published in Frontiers in Bioinformaticsbiologists Dr. Jack M Craig, Dr. Blair Hedges, and Dr. Sudhir Kumar, all at Temple University, have built an evolutionary tree that encompasses 455 primates, every species for which genetic data are available. […]
Phenotypic diversity of anglerfishes. Credit: Nature Ecology & Evolution (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41559-024-02586-3 A Rice University study sheds light on the extraordinary evolution of anglerfish, a group of deep-sea dwellers whose bizarre adaptations have captivated scientists and the public alike. The research, published in Nature Ecology & Evolutionuncovers how these enigmatic creatures defied the odds to […]
Credit: CC0 Public Domain What will humans be like generations from now in a world transformed by artificial intelligence (AI)? Plenty of thinkers have applied themselves to questions like this, considering how AI will alter lives—often for better, sometimes for worse. They have conjured dramatic scenarios, like AI-driven extinction of humans (and many other species), […]
Riley Black Science Correspondent Mammals are familiar beasts. From a squirrel on a power line to a blue whale swimming through the sea, we share the world with more than 6,000 mammal species of all shapes and sizes. While we can easily distinguish a creature like a jaguar from a reptile or a bird in […]
Forgetting is part of our daily lives. You may walk into a room only to forget why you went in there — or perhaps someone says hi on the street and you can’t remember their name. But why do we forget things? Is it simply a sign of memory impairment, or are there benefits? One […]
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Why is human culture—the shared body of knowledge passed down across generations—so much more powerful than animal cultures? “What’s special about our species?” is a question scientists have wrestled with for centuries, and now a scientist at Arizona State University has a new hypothesis that could change the way we perceive […]
Handrigan, G. R. & Wassersug, R. J. The anuran Bauplan: a review of the adaptive, developmental, and genetic underpinnings of frog and tadpole morphology. Biol. Rev. 82, 1–25 (2007). Article PubMed Google Scholar McDiarmid, R. W. & Altig, R. Tadpoles: the Biology of Anuran Larvae (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999). Stocker, M. R. et al. […]
