Why are the faces of primates so dramatically different from one another?
UCLA biologists working as “evolutionary detectives” studied the faces of 129 adult male primates from Central and South America, and they offer some answers in research published today, Jan. 11, in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The faces they studied evolved over at least 24 million years, they report. (more…)
*The team scoured more than 500 museum drawers of Green River fossils for crickets and katydids with intact front legs, looking for evidence of ears.*
How did insects get their hearing? A new study of 50-million-year-old cricket and katydid fossils sporting some of the best preserved fossil insect ears described to date are helping to trace the evolution of the insect ear.
According to paleontologist Dena Smith of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Museum of Natural History and University of Illinois Professor Roy Plotnick, who collaborated on the new study at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, or NESCent, in Durham, N.C., insects hear with help from some very unusual ears. (more…)
*Experiments on “slime mold” explain why almost all multicellular organisms begin life as a single cell*
Any multicellular animal, from a blue whale to a human being, poses a special challenge for evolution.
Most of the cells in its body will die without reproducing; only a privileged few will pass their genes to the next generation.
How could the extreme degree of cooperation required by multicellular existence actually evolve? Why aren’t all creatures unicellular individualists determined to pass on their own genes? (more…)
The tendency to perceive others as “us versus them” isn’t exclusively human but appears to be shared by our primate cousins, a new study led by Yale researchers has found.
In a series of ingenious experiments, Yale researchers led by psychologist Laurie Santos showed that monkeys treat individuals from outside their groups with the same suspicion and dislike as their human cousins tend to treat outsiders, suggesting that the roots of human intergroup conflict may be evolutionarily quite ancient. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Americans are less willing to open their wallets to pay for increased production of renewable energy resources than Canadians, a new University of Michigan report indicates. (more…)
*Alan Newell, a UA mathematics professor, studies patterns in nature, which he said have features that are universal*
When people on airplanes ask Alan Newell what he works on, he tells them “flower arrangements.”
He could also say “fingerprints” or “sand ripples” or “how plants grow.” (more…)
An international team of astronomers has identified for the first time a thick stellar disc in the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest large spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way.
The discovery of the thick disc, a major result from a five-year investigation, will help astronomers better understand the processes involved in the formation and evolution of large spiral galaxies like ours, according to the team, which includes UCLA research astronomer Michael Rich and colleagues from Europe and Australia. (more…)
Astronomers detected the faint signature of small, dim red dwarf stars in nearby galaxies (right), and found they are much more numerous than in our own Milky Way (left). Image credit: Patrick Lynch/Yale University
Astronomers have discovered that small, dim stars known as red dwarfs are much more prolific than previously thought — so much so that the total number of stars in the universe is likely three times bigger than previously believed.
Because red dwarfs are relatively small and dim compared to stars like our Sun, astronomers hadn’t been able to detect them in galaxies other than our own Milky Way and its nearest neighbors before now. Therefore, they did not know how much of the total stellar population of the universe is made up of red dwarfs.
Now astronomers have used powerful instruments on the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to detect the faint signature of red dwarfs in eight massive, relatively nearby galaxies called elliptical galaxies, which are located between about 50 million and 300 million light years away. They discovered that the red dwarfs, which are only between 10% and 20% as massive as the Sun, were much more bountiful than expected. (more…)
