News by Subject Earth Science

A Northwestern University research team has developed a new theory that can predict the movement of an animal's sensory organs -- such as eyes, ears and nose -- while searching for something vital to its life.

Fork-tailed Flycatchers, scientists just discovered, communicate with the sounds made when they flutter their feathers. And by analyzing recordings of the birds in flight, the researchers found that subspecies with different migration patterns have different "dialects" to their feather sounds, possibly helping contribute to them splitting into separate species.

Radio-resistance in bacteria first evolves through the adaptation of DNA repair mechanisms, however as evolution continues more mutations accumulate, and more cellular metabolic processes are affected. It is not yet clear which panel of mutations provides high-level resistance. The study shows that acquisition of radio-resistance via evolution is possible independent of other mechanisms like extreme dryness resistance (desiccation).

Analysis published in Scientific Reports is based on climate models for the mid-Pliocene period, which occurred 3 million years ago and shared characteristics with present-day warming.

A discovery of more than a thousand dinosaur teeth, by a team of researchers from the University of Portsmouth, proves beyond reasonable doubt that Spinosaurus, the giant predator made famous by the movie Jurassic Park III as well as the BBC documentary Planet Dinosaur was an enormous river-monster.

Populations of China, Korea, and Japan first adopted rice as their main source of nutrition more than 10,000 years ago. As a result, they have developed genomic adaptations that are protecting them from the risks entailed by the westernization of their diets.

How can we explain the fact that no single species predominates? A generally accepted hypothesis is that a trade-off exists between organisms able to acquire and consume more food than other when resources are scarce, and organisms which rapidly consume large quantities of food when they are in abundance. However, when scientists from the University of Geneva and the Technical University of Denmark analysed over 500 species, biodiversity cannot be explained with such a trade-off.

Confuciusornis was a crow-like fossil bird that lived in the Cretaceous ~120 million years ago. It was one of the first birds to evolve a beak (Fig. 1). Early beak evolution remains understudied. Using an imaging technique called Laser-Stimulated Fluorescence, researchers at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) address this by revealing just how different the beak and jaw of Confuciusornis were compared to birds we see today.