If the broad evolutionary diversification of a group of organisms were repeated by a few species in a single genus tens of millions of years after the group`s initial diversification, what would that say about the roles of contingency, constraint, and adaptation? As Darwin observed, natural selection leading to adaptation of individuals and populations is occurring gradually and all the time. But ...

Some food groups in the Mediterranean diet are more important than others in promoting health and longer life according to new research published on the British Medical Journal website. Eating more vegetables, fruits, nuts, pulses and olive oil, and drinking moderate amounts of alcohol, while not consuming a lot of meat or excessive amounts of alcohol is linked to people living longer. However, th...

Possessing a greater purpose in life is associated with lower mortality rates among older adults according to a new study by researchers at Rush University Medical Center. Patricia A. Boyle, PhD, and her colleagues from the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center, studied 1,238 community-dwelling elderly participants from two ongoing research studies, the Rush Memory and Aging Project and the M...

A novel bacterium — trapped more than three kilometres under glacial ice in Greenland for over 120,000 years — may hold clues as to what life forms might exist on other planets. Dr Jennifer Loveland-Curtze and a team of scientists from Pennsylvania State University report finding the novel microbe, which they have called Herminiimonas glaciei, in the current issue of the International ...

Roughly a billion years from now, the ever-increasing radiation from the sun will have heated Earth into inhabitability; the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that serves as food for plant life will disappear, pulled out by the weathering of rocks; the oceans will evaporate; and all living things will disappear. Or maybe not quite so soon, say researchers from the California Institute of Technology...

Astronomers using the Science and Technology Facilities Council`s (STFC) William Herschel Telescope (WHT) on La Palma have confirmed an effective way to search the atmospheres of planets for signs of life, vastly improving our chances of finding alien life outside our solar system. The team from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) used the WHT and the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) to g...

Botox is well known for its cosmetic uses, but researchers have now found that it can also significantly improve people’s quality of life if they suffer from another problem that increases with age, an overactive bladder (OAB). A study published in the June issue of BJU International shows that patients who had Botox injections to control bladder problems reported significant improvements in...

Cancer patients who are older than 65 years have poorer physical health and, in some cases, mental health when compared with people of the same age group without cancer, according to a study in the June 9 online issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Because health-related quality of life (HRQOL) before cancer is not often measured, the impact of cancer on HRQOL is poorly understoo...

Scientists have developed a new cleaning protocol for space hardware, such as the scoops of Mars rovers, which could be used on future "Search for Life" missions on other planets. The new protocol was developed as part of a project to investigate life that exists in extreme Arctic environments, which are the closest analogue we have on Earth to the surface of Mars. The studies are also ...

In the famed Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed near Bakersfield, Calif., shark teeth as big as a hand and weighing a pound each, intermixed with copious bones from extinct seals and whales, seem to tell of a 15-million-year-old killing ground. Yet, new research by a team of paleontologists from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and the Universi...