Throughout the interior spaces of humans and other warm-blooded creatures is a special type of tissue known as brown fat, which may hold the secret to diets and weight-loss programs of the future.
Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers have found the first direct evidence that an acquired trait can be inherited without any DNA involvement. The findings suggest that Lamarck, whose theory of evolution was eclipsed by Darwin’s, may not have been entirely wrong. The study is slated to appear in the December 9 issue of Cell.
Much of our knowledge about past life has come from the fossil record – but how accurately does that reflect the true history and drivers of biodiversity on Earth?
A new study involving bat skulls, bite force measurements and fecal samples collected by an international team of evolutionary biologists is helping to solve a nagging question of evolution: Why some groups of animals evolve scores of different species over time while others evolve only a few. Their findings appear in the current issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Guppies in the wild have evolved over at least half-a-million years — long enough for the males' coloration to have changed dramatically. Yet a characteristic orange patch on male guppies has remained remarkably stable, though it could have become redder or more yellow. Why has it stayed the same hue of orange over such a long period of time?
Natural selection has played a role in the development of the many skins patterns of the tiny Ranitomeya imitator poison dart frog.
If not for an observant Italian stonecutter, a recently discovered fossil whale specimen from Egypt might have become part of the edifice of some new skyscraper rather than the focus of a scientific study. This fossil skull and partial rib cage show transitional features of a new species of early whale and hint at how it became a fossil in the first place.
Unusual features of the human placenta may be the underlying cause of postpartum hemorrhage, the leading cause of maternal deaths during childbirth, according to evolutionary research at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
DNA sequences for human and chimpanzees are nearly indentical, despite vast phenotypical differences between the two species. Georgia Tech researchers have determined that the insertion and deletion of large pieces of DNA near genes are highly variable between humans and chimpanzees and may account for these major differences.
While most studies have concluded that a cold climate led to the short lower legs typical of Neandertals, researchers at Johns Hopkins have found that lower leg lengths shorter than the typical modern human’s let them move more efficiently over the mountainous terrain where they lived. The findings reveal a broader trend relating shorter lower leg length to mountainous environments that may help explain the limb proportions of many different animals.
Young genes that appeared since the primates split from other mammal species are expressed in unique structures of the developing human brain, a new analysis finds. The correlation suggests that scientists studying the evolution of the human brain should look to genes considered recent by evolutionary standards and early stages of brain development.
A new study from researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania suggests that cardiovascular disease may be an unfortunate consequence of mammalian evolution.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine say that losing the ability to make a particular kind of sugar molecule boosted disease protection in early hominids, and may have directed the evolutionary emergence of our ancestors, the genus Homo.
It's "Waterworld" snail style: Ocean-dwelling snails that spend most of their lives floating upside down, attached to rafts of mucus bubbles.
Researcher Alice Gibb of Northern Arizona University and her team have found that some fully aquatic fishes can jump effectively on land, which has significant implications for evolutional biology.
Researchers find ENaC’s appearance on eukaryotic family tree coincides with turning point in evolution—the emergence of the first multicellular creatures.
A University of Iowa-led team of paleoanthropologists from the UI and the Institute of Technology, Bandung, Indonesia has shed new light on the nature of Ice Age human evolution in Asia.
A new study found that genes involved in creating different sexes, life stages and castes of fire ants and honeybees evolved more rapidly than genes not involved in these processes. The fast-evolving genes also exhibited elevated rates of evolution before they were recruited for development.
Call a bird “birdbrained” and they may call “fowl.” Cornell University researchers have proven that the capacity for learning in birds is not linked to overall brain size, but to the relative size and proportion of their specific brain regions.
A new paper, building on recent advances in sequencing capability, now reports the complete genomes of 17 different strains of mice, creating an unparalleled genetic resource that will aid studies ranging from human disease to evolution.
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