Environmental change can drive hard-wired evolutionary changes in animal species in a matter of generations, report ecologists from Ume� University and the University of Leeds. The new findings, which overturn the common assumption that evolution occurs very slowly, could shed light in areas such as the management of fisheries, where human actions can result in […]
Addressing the long-running debate about short-term vs. long-term evolutionary change, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the changes that stick tend to take a long time, and one million years appears to be the magic number. Oregon State University zoologist Josef Uyeda, the lead author of the […]
A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes alarming changes in rainfall patterns which the researchers say indicates an out-of-kilter precipitation cycle that is leading to “rain is falling in all the wrong places, for all the wrong reasons.” The study also notes how freshwater is flowing into Earth’s oceans […]
The ancient relatives of modern dung beetles and earthworms were reduced in size by as much as 50 percent during the Earth’s last warming period, creating new concerns for agricultural scientists already worried about climbing temperatures and dwindling rainfall. The new research into dwarfism in soil dwelling organisms during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) era […]
Human activities such as fishing and hunting are having astonishingly broad and swift impacts on the body size and reproductive abilities of fish and other commercially harvested species, potentially jeopardizing the ability of entire populations to recover, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Human predation, say the […]
Climate change dogma posits that the invention of the steam engine and the advent of the coal-fueled industrial age marked the beginning of human influence on global climate. But a radical new climate theory contends that the Earth would currently be experiencing an ice-age if it weren’t for the fact that humans began planting crops […]
The U.S. Department of Energy has just announced the launch of IMPACTS – Investigation of the Magnitudes and Probabilities of Abrupt Climate Transitions – a program bringing together six national laboratories to ponder the likelihood of abrupt climate change (ACC). Argonne, Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge, and Pacific Northwest are the participating […]
Researchers from the University of Oregon (UO) have produced the first chromosomal map showing the regions of mosquito chromosomes that are evolving in response to climate change. Identifying the specific genes that control seasonal development in animals should aid in predicting which animals may be in danger from changing climates and help identify emerging disease-carrying […]
Trees and shrubs in parts of northern Canada are taking over what were once tundra landscapes at a much faster speed than scientists originally thought, according to a new University of Alberta (UA) study. The researchers involved say that the rapid northward advance of the treeline adds to the growing body of evidence supporting a […]
Evolutionary change is generally considered to be a pedestrian affair, with changes occurring over millennia. But evolutionary biologists from Harvard have shown that natural selection can occur within months, as a population’s needs change. Their study, appearing in the journal Science, was based on populations of the lizard Anolis sagrei that inhabits cays (small islands) […]
