Radiation from an exploding star may have had a profound effect on the evolution of life on Earth, a new study suggests. About 2.5 million years ago, the viruses infecting fish in Africa”s Lake Tanganyika underwent a mysterious and rapid explosion in diversity. Yet the exact cause of this change has remained a mystery. Now, … Read more
The emergence of human life may not have been as improbable as scientists once thought, a new model suggests. The finding increases the likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the researchers say. Previously, scientists assumed that for human life to emerge on Earth, it needed to pass through a series of “hard steps” … Read more
Forgetting is part of our daily lives. You may walk into a room only to forget why you went in there — or perhaps someone says hi on the street and you can’t remember their name. But why do we forget things? Is it simply a sign of memory impairment, or are there benefits? One … Read more
Scientists estimate that the earliest biological entities began to appear on Earth more than 4 billion years ago. “There was a sort of primordial soup from which certain organic molecules were formed. These were precursors to RNA and DNA,” carbon-containing molecules which combined and organized themselves into a sequence of biological reactions, said computational biologist … Read more
Approximately 25 million years ago, an ancestor of both humans and apes genetically diverged from monkeys and lost its tail. No one had identified the genetic mutation responsible for this dramatic change in our physiology — until now. In a new study published Wednesday (Feb. 28) in the journal Nature, researchers identified a unique DNA … Read more
Some marine worms have developed a strange reproduction strategy: They essentially grow a second worm on their rear ends, head and all. This bizarre twin then breaks off and swims away to mate with other swimming butts of the opposite sex. In a study published Nov. 22 in Scientific Reports, researchers described exactly how Japanese … Read more
After decades of debate, scientists believe they have identified the most recent ancestor of the sister to all animals via the novel use of an analytical technique. The finding settles a central question about the evolution of the entire tree of animal life. All animal life is descended from a single common ancestor — a … Read more
New “unprecedented” animations of the Earth show how the planet’s surface has shifted and changed over the past 100 million years. These animations are the most detailed view of the history of Earth’s topography ever, depicting the rise of mountains, the development of basins, and the transport of large masses of sediments around the globe … Read more
Ancient microbes whose existence predates the rise of nucleus-carrying cells on Earth may hold the secrets to how such complex cells first came to be. Now, for the first time, scientists have grown a large enough quantity of these microbes in the lab to study their internal structure in detail, Science reported. Researchers grew an … Read more
Charles Darwin famously marveled at the “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” produced by evolution, and indeed, Earth today teems with an estimated 1 trillion species. But how long did it take those species to evolve? The answer varies widely across lifeforms, “depending on taxa [type of creature] and environmental conditions,” Thomas Smith, a … Read more
