An Aboriginal Australian Genome Reveals Separate Human Dispersals into Asia
Abstract We present an Aboriginal Australian genomic sequence obtained from a 100-year-old lock of hair donated by an Aboriginal man from southern Western Australia in the early 20th century. We detect no evidence of European admixture and estimate contamination levels to be below 0.5%. We show that Aboriginal Australians are descendants of an early human [...]
Science Annihilated Another Disease From the Planet, Religion and Gods Couldn’t
You may not know what rinderpest was. But if you knew that this cattle killer was believed to have been a biblical plague and helped bring down the Roman Empire, you’d cheer that we wiped it off the face of the earth. Rinderpest, meaning “cattle plague” in German, was believed to have emerged at around [...]
Scientist-Politician-Atheist Offers Own Money For Origin of Life Prize
A millionaire scientist who once ran as a Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate has just launched a $50,000 prize to promote research on the origin of life. Yes, he has an ulterior motive: He hopes that researchers working on the question will eventually prove that life’s origins can be fully explained by physical and [...]
More than 1,000 species discovered in New Guinea
Treasure trove of unknown varieties of animal, bird, fish, insect and plant have been identified in the forests and wetlands of the Pacific island over a period of just 10 years Wattled Smoky Honeyeater (Melipotes carolae). Photograph: WWF A new type of tree kangaroo, a 2.5-metre-long river shark, a frog with vampire-like fangs and a [...]
First evidence that birds tweet using grammar
They may not have verbs, nouns or past participles, but birds challenge the notion that humans alone have evolved grammatical rules. Bengal finches have their own versions of such rules – known as syntax – says Kentaro Abe of Kyoto University, Japan. “Songbirds have a spontaneous ability to process syntactic structures in their songs,” he says. [...]
Researchers take dinosaurs’ temperature with teeth
Scientists in California say they have for the first time devised a way to accurately take the body temperatures of dinosaurs — by examining the creatures’ teeth. Chemical analysis of the Jurassic period fossil teeth from two sauropods — long-tailed, long-necked dinosaurs that rank among the largest land animals ever to roam the Earth — [...]
Lab yeast make evolutionary leap to multicellularity
IN JUST a few weeks single-celled yeast have evolved into a multicellular organism, complete with division of labour between cells. This suggests that the evolutionary leap to multicellularity may be a surprisingly small hurdle. Multicellularity has evolved at least 20 times since life began, but the last time was about 200 million years ago, leaving few [...]
Human retina protein can function as magnetic sensor in fruit flies
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School have discovered that a protein expressed in the human retina has the capability of sensing magnetic fields when placed into fruit flies. “It poses the question, ‘maybe we should rethink about this sixth sense,’” Steven Reppert, of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, told LiveScience. “It is thought [...]
Pigs could grow human organs in stem cell breakthrough
Scientists have found they can create chimeric animals that have organs belonging to another species by injecting stem cells into the embryo of another species. The researchers injected stem cells from rats into the embryos of mice that had been genetically altered so they could not produce their own organs, creating mice that had rat [...]
