Summary: A new study has completely revived and expanded this lost chapter of human evolution. Leveraging modern molecular genetic dating and advanced phylogenetic statistical modeling, researchers revisited the classic dataset.…
Category: Life
Young gulls’ drab plumage may help them avoid adult attacks
While many bird species go from egg to adult in months, some seabirds spend years in a sort of awkward adolescent phase, sporting darker, drabber plumage than the adults. In…
A new species of walking shark has been found in Papua New Guinea
It sounds like a scene out of a horror movie: a shark that can walk. In reality, walking sharks “are the cutest sharks that you’ll ever see,” says marine scientist…
Rafael Cabral Borges | Bee community assembly is regulated by functional traits in pristine tropical forest environments – Functional Ecologists
In this ‘Behind the paper’ blog post, author Rafael Cabral Borges – a postdoctoral fellow at the Vale Institute of Technology in Belém, Brazil – discusses his paper “Bee community…
Crabs can’t hide from an octopus with a mirror
Mirrors are tricky. Even humans aren’t born with an intuitive understanding of them; we have to learn how they work. Now, scientists have discovered that the California two-spot octopus (Octopus…
Viral Infection Found to Trigger Parkinson’s Brain Damage
Summary: Parkinson’s disease affects more than 10 million people globally, standing second only to dementia among devastating neurological disorders. The disease is pathologically characterized by the progressive destruction of dopamine-producing…
A discovery about this bat’s diet was hiding in a Renaissance painting
Last fall, scientists documented the greater noctule bat snatching songbirds out of the air for a snack. But while this was a finding relatively new to science, a Renaissance artist…
A whopping 14 million species of insects — or more — may roam Earth
A new estimate of insect diversity suggests there are at least 14 million to 20 million species buzzing and crawling around the globe. That’s double or triple other recent estimates,…
