Scientific American

Invasive Ladybug Thanks Its Parasite For Competitive Advantage

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:28:08 EST

Ladybugs love to snack on aphids and other pests. So people began importing an Asian species called the harlequin ladybird as natural pest control. But in their new environments, the harlequins wiped out native ladybugs. And they have their parasites to thank. That’s according to research in the journal Science . [Andreas Vilcinskas et al, Invasive Harlequin Ladybird Carries Biological Weapons Against Native Competitors ]

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Fossils Indicate Common Ancestor for Old World Monkeys and Apes

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:30:00 EST

From Nature magazine

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Tiny Plants That Once Ruled the Seas (preview)

Wed, 15 May 2013 07:00:00 EST

If you could hop onboard a time machine and visit the earth as it was 500 million years ago, during the Paleozoic era, you'd be forgiven for thinking you had traveled not to another time period but to another planet altogether. In essence, you would have. The continents mostly sat in the Southern Hemisphere, the oceans had vastly different configurations and currents, the Alps and the Sahara had yet to form. Land plants had not even evolved. Perhaps the most dramatic difference, however, would lie in the animals that inhabited this primeval earth. Back then, most of the world's multicellular creatures lived in the sea. Clamlike creatures called brachiopods and trilobites--those extinct cousins of today's lobsters and insects, with their hard exoskeletons, long antennae and compound eyes--reigned supreme.

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Moth Smashes Ultrasound Hearing Records

Fri, 10 May 2013 10:00:00 EST

Many moths have evolved sensitive hearing that can pick up the ultrasonic probes of bats that want to eat them. But one species comes pre-adapted for anything that bats might bring to this evolutionary arms race. Even though its ears are extremely simple -- a pair of eardrums on its flanks that each vibrate four receptor cells -- it can sense frequencies up to 300 kilohertz, well beyond the range of any other animal and higher than any bat can squeak.

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All in the Family

Wed, 01 May 2013 03:00:00 EST

A seven-million-year-old skull found in the Djurab Desert in Chad may indeed represent the earliest known member of the human family. Researchers unveiled the specimen back in 2002, assigned it to a new species, Sahelanthropus tchadensis (nickname: Toumaï), and said it was very close to the point at which the human lineage diverged from that of our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. Critics, however, countered that the skull was probably an ape's instead of that of a hominin (a creature on the line leading to us), given its primitive features. Now a new analysis of the skull supports the discoverers' claim that Toumaï is a hominin.

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Voices Considered Attractive Send Body Cues

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:00:08 EST

What makes someone sound sexy? To get a scientific viewpoint, researchers gauged volunteers' responses to different voices. The conclusion: voices considered attractive send messages about body size. The work is in the journal PLoS ONE . [Yi Xu et al., Human Vocal Attractiveness as Signaled by Body Size Projection ]

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DNA at 60: Still Much to Learn

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 08:00:00 EST

This week's diamond jubilee of the discovery of DNA's molecular structure rightly celebrates how Francis Crick, James Watson and their collaborators launched the 'genomic age' by revealing how hereditary information is encoded in the double helix. Yet the conventional narrative -- in which their 1953 Nature paper led inexorably to the Human Genome Project and the dawn of personalized medicine -- is as misleading as the popular narrative of gene function itself, in which the DNA sequence is translated into proteins and ultimately into an organism's observable characteristics, or phenotype.

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Sex with Other Human Species Might Have Been Secret of Homo Sapiens s Success (preview)

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 05:22:00 EST

It is hard to imagine today, but for most of humankind's evolutionary history, multiple humanlike species shared the earth. As recently as 40,000 years ago, Homo sapiens lived alongside several kindred forms, including the Neandertals and tiny Homo floresiensis . For decades scientists have debated exactly how H. sapiens originated and came to be the last human species standing. Thanks in large part to genetic studies in the 1980s, one theory emerged as the clear front-runner. In this view, anatomically modern humans arose in Africa and spread out across the rest of the Old World, completely replacing the existing archaic groups. Exactly how this novel form became the last human species on the earth is mysterious. Perhaps the invaders killed off the natives they encountered, or outcompeted the strangers on their own turf, or simply reproduced at a higher rate. However it happened, the newcomers seemed to have eliminated their competitors without interbreeding with them.

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The Invention of Childhood, or Why It Hurts to Have a Baby [Excerpt]

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 10:00:00 EST

The following is an edited excerpt from Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived , by Chip Walter. Walker & Company, January 29, 2013. Copyright © William J. (Chip) Walter, Jr.

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'Coelacanth' Genome Unlocked

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:00:00 EST

The South African fisherman who pulled a prehistoric-looking blue creature out of his net in 1938 had unwittingly snagged one of the zoological finds of the century: a 1.5-meter-long coelacanth, a type of fish that had been thought to have become extinct 70 million years earlier.

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Fly Cells Divide by the Clock

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 23:10:08 EST

Day and night existed long before the first primitive cells came into being. And that light/dark cycle left its mark on nearly every living thing. Microbes, plants, insects, mammals--we all experience circadian rhythms, due to molecular clocks in our cells. But that internal timer affects more than just bedtime. The body's cells may actually divide by the clock too--in fruit flies, at least.

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Can Evolution Beat Climate Change?

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 06:01:00 EST

The oceanic pincushion known as the purple sea urchin relies on its many spines and pincers for protection and food. An inability to form its spiny shell would devastate the species, which thrives on rocky shores off North America’s west coast. Unfortunately for the purple sea urchin, higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere as a result of human fossil-fuel burning presage a more acidic ocean that might make it harder to form such shells. [More]

Recommended: Adrenaline

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 12:00:00 EST

Adrenaline [More]

Bigger Not Always Better for Penis Size [Video]

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 17:45:00 EST

From Nature magazine

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Start Talking: Synthetic Biology and Conservation Biology Meet, Part 2

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:01:08 EST

Conservation biologist Kent Redford , recently of the Wildlife Conservation Society and now with Archipelago Consulting , talks about the issues facing the intersection of synthetic biology and conservation biology . He organized a conference that starts April 9th at Clare College in Cambridge, England, called “ How will synthetic biology and conservation shape the future of nature? ”

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Start Talking: Synthetic Biology and Conservation Biology Meet, Part 1

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:00:08 EST

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Biological Disciplines Meet to Break, Then Maybe Fix, Bread

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 16:57:08 EST

Synthetic biologists design and make biological devices and systems for useful purposes. Conservation biologists study biodiversity to protect species and habitat. The two groups don’t talk to each other much. Conservation biologist Kent Redford thus organized a conference, the aim: “A better communication and an attempt on our part to instill some of our values into the lives and decisions made by synthetic biologists; to change the path that those technologies may take, to make them less environmentally harmful, if not in fact environmentally beneficial.”

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Mink Young Jeopardized by Industrial Chemicals

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 12:45:00 EST

Mink dive deep into the depths of New York’s Hudson River to hunt frogs and fish. Scurrying along the river shore, they nose around in the dirt, building dens.

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Fish Uses Chemical Cloaking to Hide from Prey

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 17:30:00 EST

This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service .

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Finding My Inner Neandertal

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 10:00:00 EST

Odds are you carry DNA from a Neandertal, Denisovan or some other archaic human. Just a few years ago such a statement would have been virtually unthinkable. For decades evidence from genetics seemed to support the theory that anatomically modern humans arose as a new species in a single locale in Africa and subsequently spread out from there, replacing archaic humans throughout the Old World without mating with them. But in recent years geneticists have determined that, contrary to that conventional view, anatomically modern Homo sapiens did in fact interbreed with archaic humans, and that their DNA persists in people today. In the May issue of Scientific American, Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona in Tucson examines the latest genetic findings and explores the possibility that DNA from these extinct relatives helped H. sapiens become the wildly successful species it is today.

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