James P. Gibbs, State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry
The Galapagos Islands' giant tortoises are one of the world's best examples of evolution. Scientists are pioneering new conservation strategies to save them from extinction and restore their habitat.
Grand Prismatic Spring and Midway Geyser Basin from above.
Brocken Inaglory/wikimedia
There's long been a lack of evidence for why sex has become so much more common than asexual reproduction across nearly all species. Thankfully, this is now slowly changing.
The X-chromosome at some point evolved to be different from all other chromosomes.
Reproduction for a female fig wasp can be a nightmarish process. When she is ready to lay her eggs, she leaves the fig in which she was born and became pregnant and searches for another. After she finds…
The Australian Emperor Dragonfly is only a handful compared to its ancestors who measured more than 60cm.
Flickr/Daniel lightscaper
The time and date of the origin of insects and their pattern of evolution and survival over millions of years is revealed in a new study, published today in Science magazine. Insect relationships have…
A brittle star feeding off Lizard Island, Queensland.
J Finn/Museum Victoria
A complete tree of life – showing how and when organisms are related to each other – has long been desired by biologists, but obscured by the vagaries of the fossil record. Now, next-generation gene sequencing…
Rather than there being a single ‘gay gene’, there may be many which contribute to sexual preference.
Sasha Kargaltsev/Flickr
The claim that homosexual men share a “gay gene” created a furore in the 1990s. But new research two decades on supports this claim – and adds another candidate gene. To an evolutionary geneticist, the…
Tinamous are the closest living relatives of the flightless ratites.
Brian Gratwicke/Flickr
Human skin is a garden of microbes which is home to about 1,000 bacterial species. Most are benign but some invade the skin and cause illness – and of these, antibiotic resistant bacteria are particularly…
It’s not always easy to tell if a fish is male or female: they look more or less the same. But there are exceptions, such as guppies and, as with humans, guppy genitalia varies in size across the species…
Your genetic make up interacts with what you eat to either promote or harm good health.
Mark Lucock
A month ago, I returned to Australia from a trip to Burma. After four weeks in the country, I’d acclimatised to the culture, cuisine and people. My conditioning was so complete that on my return, I was…
In the late Devonian period, roughly 365 million years ago, fish-like creatures started venturing from shallow waters onto land. Among the various adaptations associated with the switch to land life was…
Despite three decades of research, an HIV vaccine remains elusive. The main reason for this is the virus’s uncanny ability to evolve resistance to immune control, so understanding how the virus adapts…
