By now, it’s firmly established that modern humans and their Neanderthal relatives met and mated as our ancestors expanded out […]
Category: Evolution
Dinosaur eggshells can reveal the age of other fossils
Skip to content Like rocks, egg shells can trap isotopes, allowing us to use them to date samples. When dinosaur […]
From chickens to humans, animals think “bouba” sounds round
Does “bouba” sound round to you? How about “maluma”? Neither are real words, but we’ve known for decades that people […]
Tiny, 45 base long RNA can make copies of itself
Self-copying RNAs may have been a key stop along the pathway to life. By base pairing with themselves, RNAs can […]
Looking for friends, lobsters may stumble into an ecological trap
Skip to content Gathering for mutual defense puts young spiny lobsters at risk of predators. Lobsters are generally notable for […]
The evolution of expendability: Why some ants traded armor for numbers
“Ants reduce per-worker investment in one of the most nutritionally expensive tissues for the good of the collective,” Matte explains. […]
Humans in southern Africa were an isolated population until recently
Collectively, the genetic variants in this population are outside the range of previously described human diversity. That’s despite the fact […]
AI trained on bacterial genomes produces never-before-seen proteins
The researchers argue that this setup lets Evo “link nucleotide-level patterns to kilobase-scale genomic context.” In other words, if you […]
Dinosaurs may have flourished right up to when the asteroid hit
That seemingly changes as of now, with new argon dating of strata from the Naashoibito Member in the San Juan […]
Genetically, Central American mammoths were weird
Skip to content The species’s boundaries in North America seem to have been fairly fluid. We tend to lump all […]