A rare North American bumble bee may have been on a path toward extinction long before modern human impacts, suggesting that its long-term genetic vulnerability made it especially fragile and less able to cope with both past and current environmental stresses. The study focused on the Franklin bumble bee, once found only in parts of […]
Biology • Chemistry • Evolution • Geosciences • Microbiology • Planetary Science • Robotics
A new study has revealed potential chemical signatures of ancient Martian microbial life in rocks examined by NASA’s Perseverance rover. The findings, published by a large international team of scientists, focus on a region of Jezero Crater known as the Bright Angel formation—a name chosen from locations in Grand Canyon National Park because of the […]
Authors: Davide Foffa, Research Fellow in Palaeobiology, University of Birmingham; Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, Royal Society Newton International Fellow in Palaeontology, UCL, and Emma Dunne, Assistant Professor in Paleobiology, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg Ever since the first fragments of pterosaur bone surfaced nearly 250 years ago, palaeontologists have puzzled over one question: how did these close cousins of […]
All cellular life as we know it today stems from a single common ancestor, from which all modern lineages emerged. The origin of cellular life is thought to be the node in the Tree of Life from which Archaea and Bacteria, the two primary domains, diverged. The universality of some features across cellular life evidences […]
Author: María Martinón-Torres, CENIEH Director, Atapuerca Research Team and author of “Homo imperfectus” (Ed. Destino), Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) The research team at the Atapuerca archaeological sites in Burgos, Spain, has just broken its own record by discovering, for the third time, the oldest human in Western Europe. The team […]
Scientists believe individuals of the most recently discovered hominin group (the Denisovans) that interbred with modern day humans passed on some of their genes via multiple, distinct interbreeding events that helped shape early human history. In 2010, the first draft of the Neanderthal genome was published, and comparisons with modern human genomes revealed that Neanderthal […]
The evolution of the human being has a complex form in which some branches bifurcate and form two different species and some different branches come together again and form individuals with a certain degree of hybridization. The only hominin remaining today is Homo sapiens and the last to disappear was Homo neanderthalensis. Neanderthals, our closest […]
Imagine this: you’re visiting the chimpanzee enclosure at a zoo. Some sit on the grass, chewing on leaves and scratching their heads, while others hang from the wooden beams. In a corner, a female is holding her baby. You can’t help but picture a human mom doing it in the exact same way. For a […]
We, humans, have evolved pretty big brains compared to other mammals, and even compared to our primate cousins. Recent research seems to have found the reason for the higher number of neurons in our brains (about 86 billion). It appears that a single gene is responsible for our bigger brain. The Neanderthals are an extinct […]
How did the complex organisms on Earth arise? This is one of the big open questions in biology. A team of researchers has come a step closer to the answer. The researchers succeeded in cultivating a special archaeon and characterizing it more precisely using microscopic methods. This member of the Asgard archaea exhibits unique cellular […]