Scientists have sequenced over seventy strains of yeast, the greatest number of genomes for any species.  The basic machinery of yeast is surprisingly similar to that of humans, and the project…

Show Me The Science Month Day 14 Another abstract will have to do for today's extremely delayed installment; the grant proposal leaves my desk tomorrow, so I hope to be back in business as soon as my…

Show Me The Science Month Day 13 The grant writing has reached a fever pitch as the deadline closes in. Tomorrow 30 Days of Evolution Blogging will get back on track, but for today, a title and…

Show Me The Science Month Day 12 Natural selection is often much like Goldilocks - an organism's traits shouldn't be too hot or too cold; natural selection likes them just right. In other words,…

Want to learn how to survive in exteme environments?   A marine bacterium living 8,000 feet below the ocean's surface can show you the way.    The bacterium Nautilia profundicola, a…

Show Me The Science Month Day 11 Imagine a world where the major source of human nutrition was beer. That may sound fantastic to some of you, but now imagine that, in this beer-world, there are no…

Show Me The Science Month Day 10 A pressing grant deadline is going to keep today's evolution blog entry short, but the find is no less spectacular than yesterday's fetal proto-whale fossil. A group…

A missing link in the evolution of the front claw of living scorpions and horseshoe crabs was identified with the discovery of a 390 million-year-old fossil by researchers at Yale and the University…

Show Me The Science Month Day 9 In what is now central Pakistan, an eight-and-a-half foot long, pregnant aquatic mammal went belly-up, and sank to the bottom of the shallow coastal waters. 47 million…

My Dear Mr. Darwin, Happy 200th birthday! I hope you are as well as can expected for someone who has been dead for nearly 130 years. I suppose that your final book, the one about earthworms, has a…