The World Needs Doctors? Cuba Trains Them. Elizabeth Warren Rips Citibank. Movie: Selma. The Avian Tree of Life. The Cockroach.
This animation illustrates the major branches of the avian tree of life revealed by the mapping of the complete genomes of 48 bird species -- one of the most ambitious evolutionary investigations yet.
Which bird is closest to the saltwater crocodiles, American alligators and the slender-nosed Indian gharial? Either the chicken or the ostrich, depending on how you look at it. If a genome is a shelf of books, then the chicken has been a better librarian, but the ostrich has been a more faithful translator.
It’s easy to see how evolution can account for the dark streaks in human nature—the violence, treachery, and cruelty. But how does it produce kindness, generosity, and heroism?
Our Planet of the Arthropods is dominated by insects, and when and how insects took over the earth is a question that’s puzzled naturalists for centuries. In an incredible international effort, 100 scientists combined their molecular, computational biology, statistics, paleontology, and taxonomic expertise to uncover some surprising conclusions about when major groups of insects evolved.
Pope Francis broke with Catholic tradition Monday by declaring that the theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real, and remarking that God is not “a magician with a magic wand.”
“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,” the pope said at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, during a plenary meeting dedicated to evolving concepts of nature.
In this view, hand stencils and animal paintings in Europe and Asia, separated by some 13,000 kilometers, have a common, far deeper origin in Africa.
The dogs are “true altruists,” essentially willing to shorten their lives for the sake of the hive, They’re even further along the line of evolving into the mammalian equivalent of honeybees than we thought.
Non-human social species -- like dogs -- might also be capable of demonstrating primordial jealousy. The basic structure of jealousy is straightforward: it emerges from a social triangle. When an interloper threatens an existing, important relationship, the outcome can be jealousy.
Listeners prefer and respond more favorably (or in technical terms, in a more “proceptive” fashion) to opposite-sex voices that contain these special subtle acoustics
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