Rock Paper Scissors - How Biological Mutation Wins

Rock Paper Scissors - How Biological Mutation Wins

Without knowing it, organisms search for the next “winning” strategy in evolution. Mutation plays a key role in the evolution of new, and sometimes successful, traits. It's a lot like rock-paper-…
Fruit Flies Have Latent Bioluminescence

Fruit Flies Have Latent Bioluminescence

Fruit flies are secretly harboring the biochemistry needed to glow in the dark —otherwise known as bioluminescence - according to a paper in  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.…
Lactase Persistence: A Khoe Evolutionary Tale

Lactase Persistence: A Khoe Evolutionary Tale

In a new paper, researchers writing in Current Biology show how lactase persistence variants tell the story about the ancestry of the Khoe people in southern Africa and that their pastoralist…
The Neanderthal In Modern Europeans

The Neanderthal In Modern Europeans

Although Neanderthals are extinct but fragments of their genomes persist in modern humans.  These shared regions are unevenly distributed across the genome and some regions are particularly…
How And Why Zebras Earned Their Stripes

How And Why Zebras Earned Their Stripes

Why zebras have black and white stripes is a long-standind puzzle of evolution. To find out, the researchers behind a Nature Communications paper mapped the geographic distributions of the seven…