Teams of mountaineering mice are helping advance understanding into how evolutionary adaptation to localized conditions can enable a single species to thrive across diverse environments. In a study led by Naim Bautista, a postdoctoral researcher in Jay Storz’s lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the team took highland deer mice and their lowland cousins on … Read more
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Why is human culture—the shared body of knowledge passed down across generations—so much more powerful than animal cultures? “What’s special about our species?” is a question scientists have wrestled with for centuries, and now a scientist at Arizona State University has a new hypothesis that could change the way we perceive … Read more
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain It’s sometimes said that people buy products they don’t really need, with money they don’t really have, to impress people they don’t really like. This behavior is known as conspicuous consumption because these consumers want others to see them with the product. Until now, it has been assumed that conspicuous consumption … Read more
New Cornell University research has found that, unlike birds, the evolution of bats’ wings and legs is tightly coupled, which may have prevented them from filling as many ecological niches as birds. “We initially expected to confirm that bat evolution is similar to that of birds, and that their wings and legs evolve independently of … Read more
The triangular Pareto front in the trait space of sperm length and body mass in tetrapods. Credit: Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-50391-0 An international research team has developed an innovative method to study the evolution of sperm length in tetrapods. Using the Pareto principle, scientists from Germany and Italy analyzed the complex relationships between sperm … Read more