Scientists use a powerful X-ray to scan one of the world's most important fossils to learn more about the "dinobird."

Tagged: evolution, On Campus, Humanities & Sciences

Small stretches of seemingly useless DNA harbor a big secret. There’s one problem: We don’t know what it is. Although individual laboratory animals appear to live happily when these genetic ciphers are deleted, these snippets have been highly conserved throughout evolution, suggesting that they have some value.

Tagged: Bio-X, DNA, evolution, Health Research, Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowships

Earth's creatures come in all sizes, yet they (and we) all sprang from the same single-celled organisms that first populated the planet. So how on Earth did life go from bacteria to the blue whale?  "It happened primarily in two great leaps, and each time, the maximum size of life jumped up by a factor of about a million," said Jonathan Payne, assistant professor of geological and environmental science at Stanford.

Tagged: evolution, Earth Sciences

A keystone of evolutionary history, the Thermopolis Archaeopteryx fossil, visited SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in December 2008 to undergo a revolutionary type of analysis. Using intense X-ray beams, scientists searched for characteristics of the "dinobird" that have eluded all previous scientific analyses.

Tagged: Darwin, dinosaurs, evolution, Humanities & Sciences

Who knew cat urine could be sexy? With a dab here and a dab there, you can have male rats swooning over you. For a long time, scientists have been trying to understand the underlying biology of this odd behavior without any luck. By probing the parasite's DNA, one Stanford researcher may have stumbled across the answer and added to our understanding of evolution.

 

 

Tagged: evolution, genetics, neuroscience, Human Health, Humanities & Sciences

VIDEO: "When people ask how many people can the world support, one of the first issues is, living how? Somewhere between 2 and 3 billion people in the world live on less than $2 a day, many of them on less than $1.25 a day. One of the things we need to do is get people talking about how life should be lived. Are we going to be forced to have more resource wars?" Professor Paul Ehrlich discusses these and other important issues in recent interview with Stanford Report.

Tagged: conservation, evolution, population, Environment & Sustainability, International Issues, Humanities & Sciences

Researchers at the School of Medicine have turned to the platypus to understand the genesis of an evolutionary tour de force that led to a reproductive advantage possessed by nearly all of today's mammals.

Tagged: evolution, genes, Human Health, Medicine