Where have all the ‘N-mt’s gone?
This week I would like to highlight a recent scientific publication by one of our very own contributor’s here at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! – Devin Drown. Drown and colleagues recently published...
View ArticleCarnival of Evolution, March 2013
Welcome, readers, to the 57th Carnival of Evolution. This past month, the 204th birthday of Charles Darwin just happened to fall on Mardi Gras, a celebration of life’s exuberant excesses. So put on...
View ArticleSex chromosomes in conflict
House mouse (by Wenfei Tong) Have you thought that not all the genes in your body might have the same evolutionary interests? The mouse Y chromosome has just been revealed after years of superhuman...
View ArticleJunk science
Birds do it, beetles do it … (Flickr: Henry Burrows) Last spring, the journal Current Biology published a report describing something new under the entomological sun: A genus of tiny cave-dwelling...
View ArticleGenitals are the fastest-evolving organs in the animal kingdom. Here’s why:
Genitals are weirdly shaped, which is strange. They only really NEED to be a pipette like device to inject sperm into a cup like device. But what we see in nature is way more complicated and bizarre....
View ArticleSperm packages of ungodly size, genitals that double as a souped-up stomach,...
And all of those are found in just one species, the Pieris rapae, the cabbage white butterfly. In an wonderful piece over at the Atlantic, we learn about the crazy sex life/organs of this very common...
View ArticleThe ‘Mother’s Curse’ in Canada
The idea for the mother’s curse goes like this. Most human genes are on chromosomes, but a tiny number are in mitochondria, little power factories in human cells that for reasons of evolutionary...
View ArticleThe Oldest Spider in the World
The oldest known spider in the world recently passed away. She lived an absurdly long life (over nearly half a century), viewed during most of it by Barbara Main and Leanda Mason. Her name was 16. This...
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