We’ve known for a long time that there’s an awful lot of water in space. Comets send huge amounts of the stuff hurtling every which way, and just last Thursday NASA extracted water from Martian soil for the very first time. But because the universe is, for the most part, really really cold, […]
Entries Tagged as 'evolution'
liquid lakes found on saturn’s moon
August 4th, 2008 · 3 Comments
Tags: evolution · neato · news · science · space
e. coli bacteria take evolutionary leap
June 11th, 2008 · 1 Comment
The New Scientist reports that over 20 years and 44,000 generations in the lab, a particular population of Escherichia coli (or E. coli for short) bacteria have evolved the ability to metabolize citrate, a nutrient that the bacteria normally can’t use. This is a big deal — something akin to humans developing the ability […]
Tags: evolution · fauna · nature · neato
america’s widespread experiments with human “artifical selection”
May 25th, 2008 · 2 Comments
The folks at Damn Interesting have done it again — this time with a great piece by Alan Bellows on the origins of eugenics, the practice of selectively breeding humans for the purpose of improving the gene pool.
From the article:
In 1865, Darwin’s half-cousin Sir Francis Galton pried the lid from yet another worm-can with the […]
Tags: americas · evolution · history · nature · scary · usa
italian lizards evolve dramatically in just 37 years
April 24th, 2008 · 1 Comment
I’ve started making National Geographic one of my regular online stops, and I’m starting to realize just how fantastic this magazine is. A few days ago it reported that in 1971, five pairs of Italian wall lizards were moved onto a small Croatian island. Today, they’ve taken over, and their bodies have adapted […]
