Feature Channels: Evolution and Darwin

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New research has revealed the fascinating adaptation of some Australian sea snakes that helps protect their vulnerable paddle-shaped tails from predators.

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By providing an over-abundance of energy to cells, diseases like obesity and diabetes might super-charge growth and cause cells to become cancerous.

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Male butterflies have genes which give them a sexual preference for a partner with a similar appearance to themselves, according to new research. In a study publishing February 7th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology

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In a surprising evolutionary twist, a new study suggests that while one rattlesnake may routinely feast on lizard meat, its seemingly identical neighbor snake might strike and strike and never kill its would-be reptilian prey. The first-of-its-kind research reveals significant venom variation within populations of Florida pygmy rattlesnakes, showing that effectiveness against one type of prey differs widely among individuals and opening up questions about why this variation exists.

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An international team of collaborators found that the CD4 surface protein, which is used by HIV and SIV as the receptor to enter immune cells, is highly variable among wild chimpanzees.

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Genetic analysis of sticklebacks shows that isolated populations in similar environments develop in comparable ways. The basis for this is already present in the genome of their genetic ancestors. Evolutionary biologists from the University of Basel and the University of Nottingham report these insights in the journal Evolution Letters.

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Over the past 40 years, there has been a dramatic decline in fishery landings of an iconic Baltic Sea fish: the flounder. In the 1980s, the landings of the flounder fishery in the Gulf of Finland dropped by 90 per cent, a trend that was later confirmed by fishery-independent surveys.

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Neanderthals have been imagined as the inferior cousins of modern humans, but a new study by archaeologists at UCL reveals for the first time that they produced weaponry advanced enough to kill at a distance.

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In a paper published by Evolution, research led by Swansea University's Dr Catalina Pimiento and co-authored by an international team of scientists from the UK, Europe and the USA examined the biological traits of all sharks and rays before running a series of evolutionary models to seek how gigantism evolved over time.

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New Zealand and other islands have experienced invasions of rats, Europe has seen the arrival of the spinycheek crayfish, spreading a deadly disease called crayfish plague: invasive species can put native animal and plant species on the brink of extinction. They often go undetected for a long time, or their damaging impacts are not immediately clear.

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Here's a science enigma: Try to explain where the neat, even DNA/RNA helix came from. Ha! Easy one! It probably spun around itself long before first life evolved like it did in this lab. In fact, the twist could have helped select the components of RNA, not the other way around.

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Two UBC Okanagan biologists, who have publicly solicited images of wild cats for their research, have answered that question.

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Many organisms including insects, amphibians and yeasts use sex pheromones for attracting individuals of the opposite sex, but what happens to sex pheromones as new species emerge? New research publishing January 22 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology from Taisuke Seike and Hironori Niki at the National Institute of Genetics, Japan and Chikashi Shimoda at Osaka City University, Japan studies sex pheromones in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, revealing an “asymmetric” pheromone recognition system in which one pheromone operates extremely stringently whereas the other pheromone is free to undergo a certain degree of diversification, perhaps leading to a first step towards speciation.

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Skin colour is one of the most visible and variable traits among humans and scientists have always been curious about how this variation evolved. Now, a study of diverse Latin American populations led by UCL geneticists has identified new genetic variations associated with skin colour.

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The fossil site of Malapa in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa, discovered by Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in August 2008, has been one of the most productive sites of the 21st century for fossils of early human ancestors or hominins. A new hominin species, Australopithecus sediba (Au. sediba), was named by Berger and his colleagues, following the discovery of two partial skeletons just under two million years old, a juvenile male individual-- Malapa Hominin 1 (MH1)-- and an adult female, Malapa Hominin 2 (MH2). The skeletons are under the custodianship of the University of the Witwatersrand, where they are being kept.

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Results, published in Nature Communications, have shown that the nature of the evolutionary forces which act on male fruit flies depend on how many mates a females has.

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More than three-quarters of marine mammal and sea turtle populations have significantly increased after listing of the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), according to a study published January 16 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Abel Valdivia of the Center for Biological Diversity in California, and colleagues. The findings suggest that conservation measures such as tailored species management and fishery regulations, in addition to other national and international measures, appear to have been largely successful in promoting species recovery, leading to the delisting of some species and to increases in most populations.

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Short-lived wild insects "get old" - losing some of their physical abilities - before they die, new research shows.

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The teeth of most mammals, including humans, are only replaced once in a lifetime, when the milk teeth give way to the permanent teeth. This one change is enough to adapt to the increasing size of the jaw. But elephants increase greatly in size and weight over the course of their lives - from a starting weight of 100 kilograms to several tons in adulthood. One single change of teeth would not be enough for the enormous growth of the jaw.

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An international collaboration led by scientists from the National University of Ireland, Galway, The University of St Andrews, Trinity College Dublin and the Zoological Society of London has uncovered why the venom of some snakes makes them so much deadlier than others.