'Most recent common ancestor' of all living humans surprisingly recent
...brothers,' the models suggest we are all hundredth cousins or so," said Joseph T. Chang , professor in the Department of Statistics at Yale University and senior author on the paper. Chang established the basis of this research in a previous publication with an intentionally simplified model that i...Broken arms and collateral damage: clues to predator-driven evolution
...us passing by in the current. Like their starfish cousins and other animals in the group known as echinoderms, crinoids are capable of regenerating lost body parts. Because modern day crinoids usually lose---and regenerate---their arms as a result of attacks by fish, Baumiller and Gahn reasoned that arm reg...PCB breakdown in rivers depends on sediment-specific bacteria, find Carnegie Mellon U. scientists
...an introduced PCB compared with sluggish bacterial cousins at work in contaminated Grasse River sediment. "Our goal is to determine the roles that different bacterial populations play in PCB breakdown by identifying the kinds of microbes in river sediments as well as their population size and how they remo...Lowly weeds may hold promise for curing host of common health woes
...s sometimes better than its highly touted "herbal" cousins for preventing and curing a host of diseases, according to University of Florida research. "If I had one place to go to find medicinal plants, it wouldn't be the forest," said John Richard Stepp, a UF anthropologist who did the study. "There are pro...Two dinosaurs from Africa give clues to continents' split
...ull of a wrinkle-faced, meat-eating dinosaur whose cousins lived as far away as South America and India has emerged from the African Sahara, discovered by a team led by University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno. The find provides fresh information about how and when the ancient southern continents of ...Scientists question reports of massive ant supercolonies in California and Europe
...xhibit intercolony aggression but their California cousins behave so downright friendly? The Tsutsui team turned to genetics for an answer. Previous studies of other ant species have shown that insects from the same colony don't fight among themselves, because each one carries a common scent identifying it a...Antarctic fish study may aid cardiac research
...iceps) which became isolated from its warmer water cousins around 30 million years ago when the Antarctic circumpolar current was formed. The olive-coloured fish has broad head and a narrow body. Whilst scientists know that it has 'antifreeze' in its blood and maintains a very low heart rate of less than ......lution," says Norris, who says all spirochetes are cousins even though they live in a wide variety of environments, including mud, clams, termite guts, ticks, and humans. By comparing the DNA sequences of more spirochetes, he says, "we may be able to get at the root of what makes a bacterium cause disease, l...Policy review in Science calls for Bush Administration to protect wild salmon
... release, hatchery fish can cannibalize their wild cousins and consume the food resources necessary for growth of wild fish. Hatchery fish have substantially lower ocean survival than wild fish, but those that do survive often interbreed with wild fish and dilute the gene pool with altered behavior when it c...Genes influence memory in families with Alzheimer's disease
...xtended family, including siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and others. All of the study participants were tested for memory, attention, abstract reasoning, language and visual-spatial ability. The results were then analyzed to determine how much of the individual's ability in those areas was due to genetics....It's feast or famine: Predators may drive lemming cycles, Science researchers say
...he species, populations of lemmings and their vole cousins can explode by 100 or even 1,000 times their original size and then crash on a regular basis. The collared lemming, which lives in the high-arctic tundra, is the single prey in one of the world's simplest vertebrate predator-prey relationships. The s...Specialized brain helped ancient reptiles fly and hunt
...ated--birds are dinosaurs and pterosaurs are close cousins of dinosaurs," Witmer said. "We can compare pterosaurs and birds to test hypotheses on how evolutionarily similar, but still quite distinct, animals adapted to life in the air." The brains of the modern birds and the extinct flying creatures bore som...Childhood brain tumors associated with rarely inherited BRCA2 gene mutations
...ildren from three of the families, and two distant cousins from the fourth family were born carrying two mutations of the BRCA2 gene, one inherited from each of their parents. In all four cases, the children were affected not only with Fanconi anemia, but also with brain tumors diagnosed at an average age of...Cooperation is a no-brainer for symbiotic bacteria
... nitrogeneventually lose out to their goldbricking cousins that aren't doingso? Denison and colleagues suspected that the plants were somehowpenalizing rhizobial species that "cheat" on the symbioticrelationship by fixing little or no nitrogen for the plant. To testthat hypothesis, they altered the atmospher...Borneo elephants: A high priority for conservation
... and may have parted ways with their closest Asian cousins when Borneo separated from the mainland, effectively isolating the Borneo elephants some 300,000 years ago. In the 1950s, Borneo elephants had been classified as a subspecies of Asian elephants (either Indian or Sumatran) based on anatomical differe...Cooperation between unrelated male lizards adds a new wrinkle to evolutionary theory
...back and show that in no case are they brothers or cousins or father-son pairs," Sinervo said. Once they've set up neighboring territories, the genetically similar blue males apparently work together to guard their mates. The result is an average "fitness" level (measured in terms of the number of offspring...Study suggests genetically modifying sunflowers for white mold resistance
...nes will jump from commercial plants to their wild cousins is particularly high. But there is another factor ... of resistance to white mold that their commercial cousins lack. "It looks like we are giving the wild sunflower a degree of resistance to white mold that it a...Anthrax: 'A soil bug gone bad'
...lence of B. anthracis in contrast to its bacterial cousins may also be related to how certain genes, present in both species, are expressed that is, functioning. Other major differences between B. anthracis and B. cereus may have been effected through altered gene expression rather than the loss or gain of ...Jane Goodall to receive 2003 Environmental Citizen Award
...continues to change the way we perceive our animal cousins and ourselves," says Eric Chivian, MD, HMS assistant professor, Director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment, and a former co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. "Through the Jane Goodall Institute, Dr. Goodall continues her research...Scientists identify protein channel that mediates body's ability to feel frigid temperatures
...the protein channel molecules, like ANKTM1 and its cousins the hot, warm, and cool receptors, which span the axon's membrane, connecting the inside with the outside. These receptors act like "molecular thermometers" by opening and closing according to the temperature. At a particular temperature, the recepto...