Recent advances in our understanding of human evolution challenge the way we currently name and classify our ancestors, according to new research from Monash University. The study, published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, argues that we need a rethink and proposes reclassifying all species of humans and our closely related fossil relatives that have lived in the past 4–5 million years as part of the genus Homo.
In the image above, a faint trail of stars can be seen stretching across the galaxy. These structures, known as globular cluster stellar streams, are coherent stellar structures that retain a record of their dynamical history and can provide unique insights into the evolution of galaxies and the nature of dark matter.
Globular cluster stellar streams offer astronomers a unique opportunity to map otherwise invisible dark matter and study how it behaves. For many years, they have been difficult to observe because they are extremely faint. However, advances in large astronomical data sets and sophisticated analysis techniques have recently made stellar streams one of the most promising tools in galactic astronomy.
Now, Ph.D. student Julie Kiel Holm from the Niels Bohr Institute and associate professor Sarah Pearson from DTU Space, together with an international team of researchers, have made a discovery that has never been seen before. Their findings have just been published in Nature.
The new findings could help explain what made the human brain unique during evolution.
A mouse’s brain immune cells mature in about three weeks. Their human counterparts take four to eight years, an unusually slow timetable that may help explain how the human brain develops its distinctive cognitive abilities.
Microglia are the brain’s most abundant immune cells. They protect against invading threats, remove damaged neurons and help shape neural circuits as the brain develops. Scientists at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute have now found for the first time that human microglia, like human neurons, mature far more slowly than those of other animals.
A growing body of research across paleoneurology, evolutionary biology, and chronobiology now supports the core mechanisms of Steve Nichols’s Lost Primal Eye paradigm aka Median Vision Theory (MVT). This is a regular scientific review and update posted for The Posthuman University Journal on academia.edu August 2026 Palaeoneurology and Therapsid Evolution Benoit et al. (2016) (Acta Palaeontologica Polonica): Examined over 800 therapsid fossil skulls, documenting the convergent, gradual reduction and complete loss of the parietal foramen across Permo-Triassic eutheriodonts. The study directly links the degeneration of the physical pineal eye to the evolution of mammalian endothermy, nocturnal adaptation, and the transfer of photoreception to paired lateral eyes.
Astronomers have discovered a remarkably tiny group of six young galaxies just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. This may be a rare glimpse of how some of the universe’s largest galaxies formed. The paper outlining the findings was submitted to the arXiv preprint server on July 13.
Chaotic patches The widely accepted cosmological model of the universe known as the Lambda Cold Dark Matter Model suggests that galaxies primarily form hierarchically through mergers. That means they grow piece by piece, as smaller galaxies merge over billions of years. In this context, dense regions in the early universe serve as natural laboratories to test this idea.
These dense patches, known as protoclusters and proto-groups, are young clusters of galaxies packed into a region just tens of thousands of light-years across and represent an especially brief and extreme stage in galaxy evolution. Spotting them requires telescopes sensitive enough to detect faint, low-mass galaxies at extreme distances, and precise enough to confirm that the galaxies are truly bound together.
The signals that cells use to switch genes on have remained almost unchanged across two billion years of evolution, but the ones used to switch genes off vary dramatically from one branch of life to another, according to a new study from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona.
et al. used an innovative series of screening and directed evolution steps to produce a new enzyme (CMLase) which can remove a pernicious form of advanced glycation end product (AGE) linkage from proteins. AGEs contribute to biological aging, so CMLase may possess therapeutic potential to combat parts of the aging process.
Advanced glycation end products (AGEs) in proteins, a hallmark of aging, are considered irreversible. Here, authors report the development of CMLase — an enzyme that specifically oxidizes Nε-carboxymethyl-lysine (CML) and restores the native lysine residues in vitro and in human tissue samples.
Phage therapy is the use of bacterial viruses, or bacteriophages, as antibacterial agents. It has been in use for over 100 years and is becoming increasingly common clinically. The first steps of phage therapy include identification of bacteria to be targeted and then obtaining phages with appropriate host ranges. This is followed by various approaches to in vitro phage characterization. Increasingly common for phage phenotypic characterization is the use of kinetic microtiter plate readers. They can both decrease workloads and increase throughput, especially relative to analyses that require plating on agar-based media. These colorimetric/turbidimetric/optical density approaches primarily assess phage-induced culture-wide bacterial lysis, in the shorter term, or instead the phage potential to suppress phage-resistance evolution over longer time frames. Considered here are methods relevant to phage characterization especially for phage-therapy purposes. Discussed are turbidity-reduction assays, determinations of phage antibacterial virulence, and related time-kill curve analysis. All are or can be optical density-based approaches to assessing phage-based bacterial reduction. Emphasis is placed on consideration of the utilities, limitations, and intersections of these similar methods. Emphasized is that the start of “Deviation”—where phage-treated culture turbidity diverges from phage-free controls—may represent a superior endpoint for such optical density-based bacterial-reduction protocols.
Fertilization is often imagined as a frantic race, with millions of sperm competing for a single prize. But new research by a team of evolutionary biologists from Syracuse University, the University of Siena in Italy and the University of Szeged in Hungary reveals a more surprising reality, where success can depend less on competition and more on cooperation.
The group focused its study on organisms called arthropods, a large and diverse part of the animal kingdom that includes spiders, crabs, insects and centipedes. The scientists explored instances throughout evolutionary history where arthropod sperm worked together in coordinated groups, forming structures to improve their chances of reaching and fertilizing an egg. This process, known as sperm conjugation, is reshaping what researchers thought they understood about reproduction and evolution.
Scientists have advanced the field of cancer treatment by leveraging the body’s immune system to recognize and target tumors. The study of the immune system helps better advance these treatments and boost immune responses. The evolution of immune cells and different aspects of the immune system has helped fight aggressive forms of disease. More importantly, as ancient populations become exposed to different diseases over time, heredity can protect future generations from these specific viruses and bacteria.
One specific part of the immune system, known as ‘complement’, is crucial to aiding a robust immune response. Complement is part of the innate immune system and consists of over 50 plasma proteins. Complement proteins rapidly target foreign pathogens and trigger inflammation from infection. Specifically, these proteins help puncture infected cell membranes to eliminate disease. While complement is a unified system, it takes several pathways to function: Classical, Lectin, and Alternative. These three functions trigger complement in different ways but converge into a single innate immune defense. There are also different types of complement proteins. One of the most abundant is complement C3, which acts as a critical surveyor and defense against pathogens. Compliment C3 is an ancient protein and is found in organisms such as jellyfish, playing a pivotal role in the immune system. It specifically tags infected cells with molecules for immune cells to identify and target.