Portions of Albert Einstein’s brain have been found to be unlike those of most people and could be related to his extraordinary cognitive abilities, according to a new study led by Florida State University evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk.
Two years ago, a 71-year-old Indiana man impaled his hand on a branch after cutting down a dead crab apple tree, causing an infection that led University of Utah scientists to discover a new bacterium and solve a mystery about how bacteria came to live inside insects.
A new study, published online today in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, reviewed 136 case studies to determine the underlying causes of why many populations have gone extinct due to changing climate.
In some human societies, men transfer their wealth to their sister's sons, a practice that puzzles evolutionary biologists. A new study by SFI's Laura Fortunato has produced insights into "matrilineal inheritance."
Researchers have discovered that a form of oxytocin—the hormone responsible for making humans fall in love—has a similar effect on fish, suggesting it is a key regulator of social behaviour that has evolved and endured since ancient times.
A new five-year study of plant populations demonstrated the importance of ecology in shaping a species’ evolution. When insect pests were removed from experimental fields of evening primrose, the plants evolved – in just three to four generations – to relax their defenses against pests.
Research comparing brain development in humans and our closest nonhuman primate relatives, chimpanzees, reveals how quickly myelin in the cerebral cortex grows, shedding light on the evolution of human cognitive development and the vulnerability of humans to psychiatric disorders, a GW professor finds. Myelin is the fatty insulation surrounding axon connections of the brain.
New University of Washington research suggests that early microbes might have been widespread on land, producing oxygen and weathering pyrite, an iron sulfide mineral, which released sulfur and molybdenum into the oceans.
Crows and humans share the ability to recognize faces and associate them with negative and positive feelings. The way the brain activates during that process is something the two species also appear to share, according to new research.
ll tadpoles grow into frogs, but not all frogs start out as tadpoles, reveals a new study on 720 species of frogs to be published in the journal Evolution. The study, “Phylogenetic analyses reveal unexpected patterns in the evolution of reproductive modes in frogs,” led by John J. Wiens, an Associate Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University, and colleagues Ivan Gomez-Mestra from the Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain, and R. Alexander Pyron from George Washington University, uncovers the surprising evolution of life cycles in frogs.
Tiny, humble rhabdopleurids have lived on the ocean floor for some 500 million years, outlasting more elaborate descendants, according to a new study in the journal Lethaia.
Double flowers – though beautiful – are mutants. University of Washington biologists have found the class of genes responsible in a plant lineage more ancient than the one previously studied, offering a glimpse even further back into the evolutionary development of flowers.
The origin of Cerataspis monstrosa has been a mystery as deep as the ocean waters it hails from for more than 180 years. For nearly two centuries, researchers have tried to track down the larva that has shown up in the guts of other fish over time but found no adult counterpart. Until now.
In research published in September’s American Journal of Human Genetics, Georgia Tech's Soojin Yi looked at brain samples of each species. She found that differences in certain DNA modifications, called methylation, may contribute to phenotypic changes. The results also hint that DNA methylation plays an important role for some disease-related phenotypes in humans, including cancer and autism.
Researchers pinpoint uniquely human patterns of gene activity in the brain that shed light on how we evolved differently than our closest relative. Identifying these genes could deepen understanding of human brain diseases.
Poxviruses, which are responsible for smallpox and other diseases, can adapt to defeat different host antiviral defenses by quickly and temporarily producing multiple copies of a gene that helps the viruses to counter host immunity.
What mechanisms control the generation and maintenance of biological diversity on the planet? It’s a central question in evolutionary biology. For land-dwelling organisms such as insects and the flowers they pollinate, it’s clear that interactions between species are one of the main drivers of the evolutionary change that leads to biological diversity.
Researchers capture evolutionary dynamics in a new theoretical framework that could help explain some of the mysteries of how and why species change over time.
Georgia Tech researchers are focusing on ways to fight cancer by attacking defective genes before they are able to make proteins. Professor John McDonald is studying micro RNAs (miRNAs), a class of small RNAs that interact with messenger RNAs (mRNAs) that have been linked to a number of diseases, including cancer. McDonald’s lab placed two different miRNAs (MiR-7 and MiR-128) into ovarian cancer cells and watched how they affected the gene system.
Predatory beetles can detect the unique alarm signal released by ants that are under attack by parasitic flies, and the beetles use those overheard conversations to guide their search for safe egg-laying sites on coffee bushes.
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