This week, science fans, the small matter of life on Earth as we know it. You have probably heard of the Cambrian explosion, that point about 540 million years ago when multicellular life suddenly appears in the fossil record. For the previous 3 billion years or so all life on the planet had been comprised… Read More On Algae, And How They Terraformed The Earth
When I was a kid I used to make little wooden models of dinosaurs. My favourites were my T.rex, triceratops and a pteranodon that hung from the ceiling amongst my Spitfires and Tornados. Even at that age I knew that the three main groups of dinosaurs that existed were the ornithischians (these would be your… Read More New Paper Radically Redraws the Dinosaur Family Tree
I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts the other day (The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, check it out, it’s awesome) as they discussed some new papers about hominin skulls. The first was a paper from China, published in Science, in which two crania are described that have both modern human and neanderthal… Read More Newsflash: I’m A Neanderthal, And So Are You
I saw a paper in Science this week that was simultaneously very exciting and, frankly, terrifying. It involved the study of antibiotic resistance in Escherichia coli. Many studies have been done looking at how E. coli and other bacteria can evolve resistance to both single and multi-drug environment. These are normally conducted in flasks of liquid culture,… Read More Evolution in Real Time: Antibiotic Resistance
I did something I don’t normally do yesterday. I got into an online debate about climate change. I was playing some silly game or other on my phone and looked in the chat room. Normally there’s just stuff about where to find energy and what enemies to kill but this time I just saw the… Read More Don’t Feed The Trolls
A frequent refrain amongst those who don’t accept evolution by natural selection as fact is that no one has ever seen evolution happening. Now, several decades ago this was true and in the vast majority of cases it would happen to slowly for us to reasonably observe within a human lifetime. Today, however, we have… Read More Bee-havioural Evolution Caught In Action
