Ah, giant pandas. Aside from their reputation for being, well, not the sharpest crayons in the box, they’re most closely associated with munching almost exclusively on bamboo. But that taste for bamboo has always stumped researchers. First off, other members of the bear family are either carnivorous or at the very least omnivorous. Plus, despite having evolved specific physical traits, like their strong jaws and pseudo-thumbs, to help them eat bamboo, pandas have what’s essentially a ...read more
In the murky darkness, blue and green blobs are dancing. Sometimes they keep decorous distances from each other, but other times they go cheek to cheek — and when that happens, other colors flare.
The video, reported last year, is fuzzy and a few seconds long, but it wowed the scientists who saw it. For the first time, they were witnessing details of an early step — long unseen, just cleverly inferred — in a central event in biology: the act of turning on a gene. Those blue an ...read more
Narwhals, the unicorns of the sea, have survived for a million years with low genetic diversity — a trait that usually suggests a species is close to extinction. But a recent survey found narwhals number in the hundreds of thousands, countering the assumption that lots of gene variants within a population are necessary for survival.
"There's this notion that in order to survive and be resilient to changes, you need to have high genetic diversity, but then you have this species t ...read more
In the largest-ever ancient DNA study of its kind, researchers have pieced together the history of the horse: It's an epic saga sprawling across continents and 5,000 years of evolution and domestication, and yes, it has plot twists.
Among the finds: researchers uncovered two lost lineages of the animal on opposite ends of Eurasia and determined that the modern horse is very different than even its recent ancestors, thanks in part to geopolitics.
The scope of the study included 278 sa ...read more
Lead water pipes have been a fixture of modern civilization for more than two thousand years. Ancient Romans channeled water into homes and bathhouses through lead piping. In fact, the Latin word for lead, plumbum, is where we get the English word “plumbing.” Yet we have also long recognized that lead can have a serious impact on our health. Vitrivius, who lived during the first century BCE, wrote at length about the physical harm caused by lead exposure, concluding t ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine