The Human Dynasty

Although “Viking” literally means “pirate,” recent research has indicated that the Vikings were also traders to the fishmongers of Europe. Stereotypically, these Norsemen are usually pictured wearing a horned helmet but in a new study, researchers from the University of Copenhagen, investigated what went under the helmet; the scientists extracted authentic DNA from ancient Viking [...]

(University of Washington) A pair of researchers have developed a model that suggests shuffling emerged millions of years ago as a precursor to walking on two feet as a way of saving metabolic energy by a common ancestor of today primates.

A pair of researchers have developed a model that suggests shuffling emerged millions of years ago as a precursor to walking on two feet as a way of saving metabolic energy by a common ancestor of today’s primates.

Here’s a new twist on the relationship between biology and art. Researchers describe how they were able to coat–or paint–viruses with proteins. This breakthrough should boost the efficiency of some forms of gene therapy, help track and treat viral disease and evolution, improve the efficiency of vaccines, and ultimately allow health-care professionals track the movement of viral infections within the body.

(University of Calgary) The description of an ancient amphibian that millions of years ago swam in quiet pools and caught mayflies on the surrounding land in Texas has set to rest one of the greatest current controversies in vertebrate evolution. The discovery was made by a research team led by scientists at the University of Calgary.

In recent years, US courts have consistently ruled that teaching explicitly religious alternatives to evolution in public schools is a violation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. But now a political scientist show that despite these many legal victories, a surprising number of public high school biology teachers still include creationism or intelligent design in their curriculum.

Palaeontologists have discovered fossil remains in Scandinavia of parrots dating back 55 million years. The fossils indicate that parrots once flew wild over what is now Norway and Denmark. Parrots today live only in the tropics and southern hemisphere, but this new research suggests that they first evolved in the North, much earlier than had been thought.

Computational biologists have for the first time tackled the dilemma of how to study the ancestry of multidomain genes, which encode an important class of proteins called multidomain proteins that are crucial to human health. They found that standard methods for analyzing gene evolution, are critically flawed when applied to multidomain genes, mutations of which often are associated with cancers.

Researchers have sequenced the entire genetic code of 23 strains of Flavivirus, the virus that causes St. Louis encephalitis, to understand its evolutionary history. This study, published in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, found that a single mutation made the virus pathogenic to humans and that the North and South American strains divided about 116 years ago.

Evolution is supposed to inch forward over eons, but sometimes, at least in the case of a little fish called the threespine stickleback, the process can go in relative warp-speed reverse, according to a new study. The adaptation coincides with the ’60s cleanup of toxic pollution in Seattle’s Lake Washington.