News by Subject Medicine & Health

UTA researchers set out to determine whether pythons could have adapted to an extreme Florida freeze event in 2010. They generated data for dozens of samples before and after the freeze event. By scanning regions of the Burmese python genome, they identified parts of the genome that changed significantly between the two time periods, providing clear evidence of evolution occurring over a very short time scale in this population.

In a recent study published in Landscape Ecology, University of Illinois researchers and others found that a common cattle forage grass, tall fescue, is associated with nest failure in dickcissels, small grassland birds similar to sparrows.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the University of Leipzig presented experienced human raters with digital images of rhesus macaques of different ages and asked them to identify related individuals. They found that although infant rhesus macaque faces are individually distinguishable, only just before they reach puberty can offspring be matched correctly to the faces of their parents.

A new study published this week found that the social lives of sweat bees -- named for their attraction to perspiration -- are linked to patterns of activity in specific genes, including ones linked to autism.

The female of a sex-role reversed cave insect species Neotrogla has evolved a switching valve to receive more semen during mating, when a penis-like structure in the female anchors in the male 'vagina.'

Like people, blue crabs aren't all the same sizes and shapes. Now Rutgers scientists have discovered substantial differences in the body structures of larval crab siblings and among larvae from different mothers. And that can mean the difference between an early death and survival into adulthood for this important commercial and recreational species.