Enlarge (credit: David Aubrey ) Over the last decade or so, the science community has been concerned about what has been called the “reproducibility crisis”: the apparent failure of some significant experiments to produce the same results when they’re repeated. That failure has led to many suggestions about what might be done to improve matters, […]
Enlarge / The vaquita’s population is small, but it may have purged most of its harmful mutations in the past. (credit: David Schneider) With only around 10 individuals left in the world, a tiny porpoise called the vaquita is facing extinction. Somewhat surprisingly, despite the relative shallowness of its gene pool, inbreeding isn’t likely to […]
Enlarge / In the case of the samoyed, selection for physical characteristics produced a dog that sure looks happy. (credit: Zhao Hui) Many dog breeds are purely about appearance—think poodles and the Pekingese. But plenty of other breeds are devoted to specific tasks, like racing greyhounds. For many of these tasks, physical appearance isn’t enough: […]
Enlarge / Hair from Lakota Sioux leader Sitting Bull’s scalp lock, from which DNA was extracted for analysis. (credit: Eske Willerslev) An international team of scientists has confirmed the lineage of a living descendent of the famous Lakota Chief Sitting Bull via a new method of DNA analysis designed to track familial lineage using ancient […]
Enlarge (credit: Bisakha Datta / Getty Images ) In the wake of severe poaching problems, some wildlife authorities have resorted to removing the horns of rhinos in order to eliminate the reason they’re poached in the first place. It turns out that, in the wake of a serious poaching event, evolution came up with a […]
Enlarge / The Island of Rarotonga, which the new study suggests was settled around 830 CE by people arriving from the vicinity of Samoa. (credit: Matthew Williams-Ellis / Getty Images) The spread of the Polynesian culture across the Pacific was the greatest migration in humanity’s history. All indications are that the Polynesians started in Taiwan […]
Enlarge / On the outside, these heavily engineered bacteria look no different from their normal peers. (credit: Raphael Gaillarde / Getty Images) Many of the fundamental features of life don’t necessarily have to be the way they are. Chance plays a major role in evolution, and there are alternate paths that were never explored, simply […]
Enlarge / The home territory of New Guinea highland populations. (credit: Marc Dozier) The inhabitants of the Pacific came in waves. Aboriginal Australians were the first to cross the area, and they were followed by separate populations that inhabited New Guinea and nearby island chains. Later still, the Polynesians, descendants of early East Asians, spread […]
Enlarge / Coronaviruses (credit: Getty | BSIP) Ever since the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, began jumping from human to human, it’s been mutating. The molecular machinery the virus uses to read and make copies of its genetic code isn’t great at proofreading; minor typos made in the copying process can go uncorrected. Each time the virus […]
Enlarge (credit: Wikimedia commons) Dire wolves had a burst of newfound fame with their appearance in Game of Thrones, where they were portrayed as a far larger version of more mundane wolves. Here in the real world, only the largest populations of present-day wolves get as large as the dire wolf, which weighed nearly 70 […]