Beauty and Strength Makes The Perfect Weapon
A new study shows how a humble crab can accomplish the difficult trick of merging beauty with strength.
Male fiddler crabs face two major challenges in their life: attracting females and fending off competing males. The crabs rely on an extra-large claw to achieve both of these goals. However, scientists have assumed that as the male crab evolved, it was forced to make a trade off between an attractive, long claw, or a shorter one that's more effective in combat, until now.
Now, new research shows that function and beauty may reside in the same fiddler crab claw after all. The new study, led by Dr. Stefan Dennenmoser and Dr. John Christy, from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute,...
Crows Know When You're Looking at Them
Crows are pretty smart creatures. They can use tools to get food, recognize people (and even the cars they drive), and have shown signs of extensive social behavior. But it is pretty unusual for a wild animal to respond to human facial expressions or eye contact. While any dog owner (and possibly cat owner) can tell you that these pets can read our emotions and faces, this behavior has never been observed in wild animals. Now, a new report led by Dr. Barbara Clucas, from...
Bigfoot Genome Sequenced, Perhaps
The research team, led by Dr. Melba Ketchum, announced the analysis of 111 blood, tissue and hair samples of the famous creature. The team also claims to have sequenced portions of mitochondrial DNA (which traces a lineage from the mother side), single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) (which can map out variations between individuals and species), as...
How the Whale lost its Hair
The research, led by Dr. Guang Yang, found that natural selection acting on two genes responsible for...
Why Dinosaurs got so big?
For These Apes Social Networking is Worth More Than Food
How plants helped us evolve
The most widely accepted hypothesis proposed to explain how primates evolved from other mammals is the so-called "visual predation" hypothesis, originally proposed by Dr. Matt Cartmill in...
Gut Bacteria: A 100 Trillion Guests?
Now, new...
Unlocking the Secret of Regeneration
Scientists find new clues on how bacteria resist antibiotics
The widespread use of antibiotics over the past decades has led to the emergence of resistant bacteria. Since their discovery in the 1930s, antibiotics have been overused in human medicine and in industrial farms as food supplements to promote animal growth. A shocking 80% of antibiotics produced in the USA are used in farms, despite warnings from the World Health Organization of the danger this poses to public health. Antibiotic resistant bacteria can spread from animals...
Cancer research: fruit flies take it down a notch
Why Drosophila? When compared to other lab animals like mice, for instance, flies have many advantages. They...
Good Genes, Bad Genes, Who Knows...
Researchers from Cambridge and Cardiff universities found that a normal person typically has about 400 DNA mutations in potentially important sites in the genome. But the researchers also found that people carrying these disease-causing mutations usually, and who represent about 10% of all the people carrying these mutations, have a very mild version of...
Licence to die?
As appalling as this may seem today, smoking on airplanes was only banned by most airlines in the late 1990s....
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