Medicine & TechnologyAnyone who knows paleontology, knows the older the sediment, the greater the potential for documenting the evolution of life on earth. I guess the same can be said of certain naturalists, namely David Attenborough, who has been exploring life on our planet for almost 90 years.
In the search for the origins of life, scientists have found a striking new link between lone cells and complex creatures like humans. The connection comes from observing life under the harsh conditions that exist near volcanoes more than a mile below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
It’s a well-known fact that in nature it’s often the boys that have the better looks. Without the task of investing their energy and resources into the next generation of children males are able to reallocate their resources into preening and looking pretty. But it’s a curious case that is far from what the original evolutionary biologists once thought.
In an unprecedented study which involved the largest set of gemoes from a single human population, researchers found data suggesting that the "father of humanity" lived 100,000 earlier than previously thought.
What could be worse than living on a frozen tundra, you ask? Experiencing the world in only two tastes has got to be pretty rough. And when you’re noshing down on fish day in and day out, only being able to taste things that are salty or sour has got to be a bummer too. But sadly, this is the life of the penguin.
While it may take children a couple of years to learn the true values of arithmetic, a new study conducted by ethologist Dr Rosa Rugani, from the University of Padova, reveals that newborn chicks can not only recognize number patterns but also place them in ascending order from left to right. In fact, while the cognitive ability to count may seem like an acquired trait taught to us in school, Rugani’s recent experiments prove that even those with bird brains can display a knack for “number mapping”.
Anthropologists now believe that some of the earliest human ancestors who lived 3.2 million years ago had hand structures much like our own and were able to grasp and use tools, even if they had not invented them yet.