Biology

According to a study published in the journal PLoS Biology, two closely related great ape species — the bonobo (Pan paniscus) and the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) — share not only the physical form of the gestures but also many gesture meanings. Chimps and bonobos use gestures to initiate and …

An international team of scientists led by Museums Victoria and the University of Melbourne has scanned all known joey specimens of the Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus) — an iconic Australian marsupial predator that was hunted to extinction in the early 1900s — to create 3D digital models which have allowed …

An international team of scientists has uncovered information about the nerve networks required for walking on land, suggesting the last common ancestor of sharks and mammals walked underwater about 400 million years ago (Devonian period). The study appears in the journal Cell. Little skates (Leucoraja erinacea). Image credit: Monash University. …

Most of your cells contain a complete set of instructions to build a person stored in DNA. Scientists have worked for years on developing a storage technology that could harness the incredible density of DNA to store other types of data, but it’s been slow going. Now, a team from …

An international team of marine biologists from the United States and Belize has confirmed that sixgill sharks residing in the Atlantic Ocean are a different species than their counterparts in the Indian and Pacific oceans. The team’s findings were published online this month in the journal Marine Biodiversity. An adult …

A team of scientists from the University of Edinburgh, UK, and the University of Turku, Finland, has investigated the personality structure of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) and discovered that personality in these elephants manifests through three different factors: attentiveness, sociability, and aggressiveness. Seltmann et al studied Asian timber elephants in …

By using cryo-electron tomography, an international team of scientists has identified a completely new nanostructure — named the Tail Axoneme Intra-Lumenal Spiral (TAILS) — inside human spermatozoon tails. The human spermatozoon tail is a highly complex machine that consists of around a thousand different types of building blocks. Image credit: …

An international team of lepidopterists has compiled the most comprehensive evolutionary tree for butterflies to date. The results appear in the journal Current Biology. First comprehensive map of butterfly evolution: branch support is color coded according to the support thresholds indicated on the legend, and the shape indicates whether the …

According to a new study to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the first plants to colonize the Earth originated around 500 million years ago (Cambrian period) — 100 million years earlier than previously thought. Rhynia gwynne-vaughanii, 400 million-year-old fossil plant stem from Aberdeenshire, Scotland. …

James Cook University researcher Dr. Jan Strugnell and Australian Museum Research Institute’s Dr. Mandy Reid have discovered and described a new species of pygmy squid in Australian waters. The Hallam’s pygmy squid (Idiosepius hallami), attached to a seagrass blade, Cudgen Creek, northern New South Wales. Image credit: Mandy Reid. “Although …