Tag: biology
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PBS Eons: How Dinosaurs May Have Cursed Us With Aging
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about how aging in mammals might be due to evolved traits while we lived alongside dinosaurs.
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What defines a species? Inside the fierce debate that’s rocking biology to its core
Scientists have long debated whether the Florida panther is a North American cougar (Puma concolor couguar) or its own unique subspecies (P. c. coryi), ultimately settling on the former. The debate is part of a growing crisis in how scientists classify species. (Image credit: Maria Klos for Live Science) LiveScience has an interesting article about a…
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PBS Eons: Beans & Bees (Not Bats) Gave Us Butterflies
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the origin of butterflies. Turns out, instead of having bats to thank for the existence of butterflies, the groups we should actually be thanking are…bees and beans.
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PBS Eons: You’re Living On An Ant Planet
PBS Eons has a new episode over on Youtube. We are all living on an ant world…. How did ants take over the world? Well, it looks like they didn’t achieve world domination all by themselves. They may have just been riding the wave of a totally different evolutionary explosion.
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PBS Eons: We Helped Make Mosquitoes A Problem
PBS Eons has a new video on Youtube. This one is about the pesky mosquitoes. Around 6,000 years ago, in the Sahel region of Africa, a lone female mosquito buzzed through the lush, green savannah. She couldn’t know it, but the planet itself was about to change in ways that would see her descendants evolve…
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PBS Eons: When Our Culture Changed Our DNA
PBS Eons has a new episode on Youtube. This one is about the complex mix of culture, biology, and evolution. Thanks to our ability to develop and share complex learned behaviors across generations – a thing we sometimes call culture – we have become the ultimate niche builders.
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PBS Eons: Are We All Actually Archaea?
PBS Eons has a new episode over on Youtube. This one is about the Tree of Life and our (Eukarya) placement in it. The unexpected discovery of an entirely new domain of life was pretty huge and surprising – even if archaea do just look like bacteria. But, in recent years, it’s been their connection…
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PBS Eons: Did An Ancient Pathogen Reshape Our Cells?
PBS Eons has a new episode over on Youtube. This one is about the evolution of mammals and how we came to not have alpga-gal. There is one – and only one – group of mammals that doesn’t have alpha-gal: the catarrhine primates, which are the monkeys of Africa and Asia, the apes, and…
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PBS Eons: Giant Viruses Blur the Line Between Alive and Not
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the evolution of giant viruses. In 2003, microbiologists made a huge discovery. One that would force us to reconsider a lot of what we thought we knew about the evolution of microbial life: giant viruses.
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Roy Plotnick: Forehead Aliens, Rishathra, and the Ecology of Alien Worlds
Roy Plotnick has another insightful post on Medium. This one is about evolutionary biology. As a Star Trek fan, I appreciate the writers attempt to explain within their universe what were actually constraints produced by the need to use human actors and save on CGI. Personally, I don’t think it was necessary (don’t get me…
