“It is clear that life has had a profound role in creating the world we are used to, and the planet has similarly affected the trajectory of life. I think it’s important people acknowledge the miracle of their own existence and recognise what an amazing planet this is.”
Scientists say we’re all eukaryotes: Plants, animals, fungi, and tiny multicelled organisms called protists are the four kingdoms of life, which encompass everything living that we’ve found on Earth.
But a new discovery from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, published in Nature, claims to have discovered a fifth kingdom of life—a new kind of eukaryote. The paper describes two organisms, one newly unearthed in Nova Scotia and one discovered in 1988, which upon DNA analysis are more distinct from anything else than previously thought.
wind turbines are creating a “predation-free environment” that is changing the behaviour and even the form of creatures lower down the food chain.
A new large-data study of fossil and extant bivalves and gastropods in the Atlantic Ocean suggests laziness might be a fruitful strategy for survival of individuals, species and even communities of species. The results have just been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B by a research team based at the University of Kansas.
Evolution holds that we all came from a single animal. But what was this animal like?
“This work illustrates that members of complex communities can evolve together, laying the groundwork for future research on how these organisms evolve in response to reliable partnerships.”
Blood is not only teeming with bacterial and viral disease, it is also very poor in nutrients — too few carbs and vitamins, way too much salt.
It’s a miracle Dracula lived as long as he did.
An extraordinary new species of arachnid, resembling a spider with a tail, has been discovered in amber from Myanmar (formerly Burma), of mid-Cretaceous age, around 100 million years ago.
Human evolution can seem like a phenomenon of the distant past which applies only to our ancestors living millions of years ago. But human evolution is ongoing. To evolve simply means that mutations – the accidental changes to genes that happen normally in the process of copying DNA – are becoming more or less common in the population over time.
“World’s oldest fossils found in discovery with ‘staggering’ implications for the search for extra-terrestrial life”
The oldest known fossils – dating back 3.7 billion years to a time when the Earth was still being bombarded by asteroids – have been found in Greenland, scientists announced in a discovery that could have “staggering” implications.
Commenting on the discovery, a Nasa expert on the early Earth said if the fossils were evidence of living creatures then the discovery showed “life is not a fussy, reluctant and unlikely thing” – increasing the chances that it will have developed on Mars and elsewhere in the Universe.