History in Biological News

Geography and history shape genetic differences in humans

New research indicates that natural selection may shape the human genome much more slowly than previously thought. Other factors -- the movements of humans within and among continents, the expansions and contractions of populations, and the vagaries of genetic chance have heavily influenced the d...

Penn Medicine honored for its historic role in the history of microbiology

(PHILADELPHIA) The University of Pennsylvania was honored by The American Society for Microbiology last Friday with a plaque dedication ceremony celebrating the designation of its third Milestones in Microbiology site. Formally known as the Laboratory of Hygiene, the current Vagelos Laboratorie...

NJIT history professor receives national endowment for humanities

Richard B. Sher, PhD, a professor of history at NJIT and a former Guggenheim Fellow, has received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship to edit a volume of the correspondence of James Boswell, the eighteenth-century Scottish writer. Boswell was best known for his biography of Sa...

Italy's geologic history becomes a personal tale in Walter Alvarez's new book

Berkeley -- Italy's mountains, from the Apennines to the Alps, have fascinated University of California, Berkeley, geologist Walter Alvarez for more than 35 years, resulting in a new book, " The Mountains of Saint Francis ," that traces Italy's billion-year geologic history with a focus on Italian...

Human connection to our nation's fisheries comes alive through oral history project

Voices from the Fisheries , an archive of oral histories of recreational and commercial fishermen and the communities and families that rely on them, documents the human experience with the nation's coastal, marine and Great Lakes environments and living marine resources. Social scientists Sus...

Revealing the evolutionary history of threatened sea turtles

It's confirmed: Even though flatback turtles dine on fish, shrimp, and mollusks, they are closely related to primarily herbivorous green sea turtles. New genetic research carried out by Eugenia Naro-Maciel, a Marine Biodiversity Scientist at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the Amer...

Research pushes back history of crop development 10,000 years

Researchers led by Dr Robin Allaby of the University of Warwick's plant research arm Warwick HRI have found evidence that genetics supports the idea that the emergence of agriculture in prehistory took much longer than originally thought. Until recently researchers say the story of the origin o...

NYU, American Museum of Natural History receive $1.6 million NSF grant

New York University and the American Museum of Natural History have received a $1.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation to explore plant evolution and to create a public database that provides information about the structure and inferred function of proteins found in two plant genom...

Greenland ice core reveals history of pollution in the Arctic

New research, reported this week in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that coal burning, primarily in North America and Europe, contaminated the Arctic and potentially affected human health and ecosystems in and around Earth's polar regions. ...

Fossil and molecular evidence reveals the history of major marine biodiversity hotspots

This press release is available in Spanish . The journal " Science " has published in the issue of the 1st of August the results of a detailed research work about the evolution of marine diversity all through the last 50 million years. The study has been carried out with the participation o...

Unheard of life history for a vertebrate

There is a newly discovered life history among the 28,300 species of known tetrapods, or four-legged animals with backbones. A chameleon from arid southwestern Madagascar spends up to three-quarters of its life in an egg. Even more unusual, life after hatching is a mere 4 to 5 months. No other kno...

Geology and biology meet in the history of US southwestern desert surface waters

Boulder, CO, USA The history of surface waters in the arid deserts of the U.S. southwestern Great Basin and lower Colorado River region has fascinated scientists for over two centuries. A new publication by the Geological Society of America covers a wide diversity of closed basins, ancient lake b...

Ancient DNA: reconstruction of the biological history of Aldaieta necropolis

A research team from the Department of Genetics, Physical Anthropology & Animal Physiology in the Faculty of Science and Technology at the Leioa campus of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), and led by Ms Concepcin de la Ra, has reconstructed the history of the evolution of human popul...

Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History reveals ants as fungus farmers

It turns out ants, like humans, are true farmers. The difference is that ants are farming fungus. Entomologists Ted Schultz and Sen Brady at the Smithsonians National Museum of Natural History have published a paper in the March 24 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sc...

Lemurs' evolutionary history may shed light on our own

DURHAM, N.C. -- After swabbing the cheeks of more than 200 lemurs and related primates to collect their DNA, researchers at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (IGSP) and Duke Lemur Center now have a much clearer picture of their evolutionary family tree. Found in nature only on the...

Journal Sleep: Insomniacs are more likely to report a family history of the sleep disorder

WESTCHESTER, Ill. Individuals with either current or past insomnia are more likely to report a family history of insomnia than are those who have never had the sleep disorder, according to a study published in the December 1 issue of the journal SLEEP. The study, authored by Simon Beaulieu-Bon...

Rebuilding the evolutionary history of HIV-1 unravels a complex loop

An essential component of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) molecular machinery responsible for infecting cells consists of functionally-specialized layers, according to a study by investigators at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) Antiviral Research Center (AVRC), published Nov...

Microfossils disclose geologic history of eastern California

Boulder, CO, USA The Bird Spring Shelf in southeastern California and basins to the west reveal a complex history of late Paleozoic sedimentation, sea-level changes, and deformation along the western North American continental margin. A new book published by the Geological Society of America captu...

Census of protein architectures offers new view of history of life

The present can tell you a lot about the past, but you need to know where to look. A new study appearing this month in Genome Research reveals that protein architectures the three-dimensional structures of specific regions within proteins provide an extraordinary window on the history of life. ...

Salt marshes: A natural and unnatural history

Now championed as critical habitats for plants, animals, and people because of the environmental service and protection they provide, salt marshes were once considered unproductive wastelands, home solely to mosquitoes and toxic waste, and mistreated for centuries by the human population. Explorin...

Tiny differences in our genes help shed light on the big picture of human history

By examining very small differences in people's genes, scientists from Cornell University have developed a new tool for identifying big events in human history and pinpointing the origins of specific gene mutations. This research, published in the May issue of the journal GENETICS ( http://www.g...

DOE makes largest Danforth Campus research award in history

Washington University and the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center have received two awards totaling $35 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to do research on novel energy initiatives. At $20 million, the Washington University award is the largest ever received on the Danforth Campus...

Study of protein structures reveals key events in evolutionary history

A new study of proteins, the molecular machines that drive all life, also sheds light on the history of living organisms. The study, in the journal Structure , reveals that after eons of gradual evolution, proteins suddenly experienced a "big bang" of innovation. The active regions of many pro...

Chantix side effects no worse with depression history

People with a likely history of depression who take varenicline (Chantix) do not report more severe mood symptoms, medication side effects, or less success quitting smoking compared to people with no history of depression taking this drug. The findings by Group Health, Free & Clear, and SRI I...

New study indicates link between weight gains during pregnancy and dieting history

October 1, 2008, St. Louis, MO Women who have a history of dieting or other restricted eating practices are at risk of gaining an inappropriate amount of weight during pregnancy. In a study published in the October 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, researchers from...

Smithsonian scientists find evidence that could rewrite Hawaii's botanical history

Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution have discovered data that suggests one of Hawaiis most dominant plants, Metrosideros, has been a resident of the islands far longer than previously believed. Their findings are being published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B in London...

Jeremy Jackson honored by Harvard Museum of Natural History

Jeremy Jackson, renowned marine ecologist with Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, has been selected to receive the 11th annual Roger Tory Peterson Medal presented by the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Jackson will deliver the Roger Tory Peterson Memorial Lecture on Sunday, Ap...

Man-made changes bring about new epoch in Earth's history

Geologists from the University of Leicester propose that humankind has so altered the Earth that it has brought about an end to one epoch of Earths history and marked the start of a new epoch. Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams at the University of Leicester and their colleagues on the Stratigra...

New study sheds light on Galápagos hawk evolutionary history

Scientists at the University of Missouri-St. Louis used DNA sequences from feather lice to study how island populations of their host, the Galpagos Hawk might have colonized the Galpagos islands, home to the endangered and declining raptor. The study, recently published online in the journal Mo...

Satellites witness lowest Arctic ice coverage in history

The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk to its lowest level this week since satellite measurements began nearly 30 years ago, opening up the Northwest Passage a long-sought short cut between Europe and Asia that has been historically impassable. In the mosaic image above, created ...

Microfossils unravel climate history of tropical Africa

Scientists from the NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research obtained for the first time a detailed temperature record for tropical central Africa over the past 25,000 years. They did this in cooperation with a German colleague from the University of Bremen, The scientists developed an ent...

Ocean seep mollusks may share evolutionary history with other deep-sea creatures

The unusual mollusks of oceanic cold seeps--strange clams, mussels and sea snails that thrive in the sulfur and methane-rich environments--are on average older than the marine mollusk community as a whole, according to a new report in the 8 September issue of the journal Science, published by AAAS,...

Illinois pig to make history as source of first complete swine genome

A pig used for research at the University of Illinois atUrbana-Champaign has a home in history. Its DNA will provide the first sequence of the swine genome to be completed with the help of a two-year $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced today (Jan. 13) by Agriculture ...

Finding rewrites the evolutionary history of the origin of potatoes

Humans have cultivated potatoes for millennia, but there has been great controversy about the ubiquitous vegetable's origins. This week, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, a team led by a USDA potato taxonomist stationed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has for ...

Divergent life history shapes gene expression in brains of salmon

Scientists working with salmon have found that gene expression in the brain can differ significantly among members of a species with different life histories. Their study indicates that roughly 15 percent of Atlantic salmon genes show differential expression in males who migrate from their freshwat...

NIH stimulus funding supports Emory biomedical scientists

... and complication rates after a heart attack. This set of studies evaluates risk factors connected with heart disease in women such as: depression and history of trauma and biological changes in the heart and brain and inflammation in response to stress. Pediatric heart development: Children's hearts resp...

AGU journal highlights -- Aug. 6, 2009

...est that the mantle could be chemically homogeneous but thermally differentiated because of a large heat flux from the core. This implies that thermal history models of the Earth may have to be reevaluated. Most important, the good agreement between their geodynamic models and tomographic images argues for m...

Carnegie Mellon's Jean VanBriesen leads research team on Monongahela River

...arsighted effort to avert a problem before it arises. Carnegie Mellon's research resonates with the mission of the Colcom Foundation, which has a long history of assessing and addressing the cause before it's necessary to respond to the symptom. It's a privilege to support Carnegie Mellon's preventative stra...

Moving to the US increases cancer risk for Hispanics

...tion. "Don't assume that all Hispanics are the same," Ramirez said. "Physicians should probe Hispanic patients more on their background and family history to identify any problematic behaviors that could contribute to health problems." Patients should become better informed of some of the positive asp...

Scary ancient spiders revealed in 3-D models, thanks to new imaging technique

... it's really exciting to be able to look at them in such detail. Our study helps build a picture of what was happening during this period early in the history of life on land. We think one creature could have responded to increasing predation from the amphibians by growing spikes, while the other responded b...