The evolutionary transition between single-celled organisms and multicellular life as we know it took several billion years to occur in nature, but under artificial pressure, evolutionary biologists have been able to make it happen in 60 days.
Read more @ SciTechDaily
How much do you know about geeks? At what stage of geekiness are you? Amazingly, the work geek comes from ‘gecken’, which referred to circus performers biting heads off chickens. Wait, does that mean that Ozzy is a geek?
Read more @ Technabob
Funny, I thought that this was a good article, as we might become endangered once again at some time in the future.
A fascinating article about how dogs became domesticated. It’s true that dogs that are allowed to become feral will become village dogs, not wolves.
At this early stage, the only interactions between humans and these incipient dogs were hostile. If wolves were becoming domesticated it was by self-domestication, not deliberate domestication by people. Deliberate domestication came later.
The tame foxes not only behaved like domestic dogs, they looked like them. They lost their foxy pelage and became piebald black and white, like Welsh collies. Their foxy prick ears were replaced by doggy floppy ears. Their tails turned up at the end like a dog’s, rather than down like a fox’s brush. The females came on heat every six months like a bitch, instead of every year like a vixen. According to Belyaev, they even sounded like dogs.
It’s not surprising, but with the injuries I sustained last year while running 40-50km a week, it was apparent that something was going on. It’s obvious that many runners pound the pavement way too hard, relying on their shoes to absorb the impact. This is why flat soles have made a comeback. You could always run barefoot or use a Vibram Five-Fingers, Personally, I’d like to cut down the chances of cutting my feet, so I’ll try running at least one a week with Five-Fingers.
On a hot day, the two scientists wrote, a human could even outrun a horse in a 26.2-mile marathon.
This is kind of amazing news, since it’s supposed to eliminate the missing link theory from our evolution into modern humans. This means that the common ancestry between humans and apes is even further back, between 6 and 9 million years ago. Ardi walked upright, but used all four limbs when in trees.
Scientists today announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a human ancestor. The find reveals that our forebears underwent a previously unknown stage of evolution more than a million years before Lucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago.
“This find is far more important than Lucy,” said Alan Walker, a paleontologist from Pennsylvania State University who was not part of the research. “It shows that the last common ancestor with chimps didn’t look like a chimp, or a human, or some funny thing in between.”
(via kottke)
