Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists have recovered DNA from a well-preserved horned lark found in Siberian permafrost. The results can contribute to explaining the evolution of sub species, as well as how the mammoth steppe transformed into tundra, forest and steppe biomes at the end of the last Ice Age.

In 2018, a well-preserved frozen bird was found in the ground in the Belaya Gora area of north-eastern Siberia. Researchers at the Centre for Palaeogenetics, a new research center at Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History, haves studied the bird and the results are now published in the scientific journal Communications Biology. The analyses reveals that the bird is a 46,000-year-old female horned lark.

“Not only can we identify the bird as a horned lark. The genetic analysis also suggests that the bird belonged to a population that was a joint ancestor of two sub species of horned lark living today, one in Siberia, and one in the steppe in Mongolia. This helps us understand how the diversity of sub species evolves,” says Nicolas Dussex, researcher at the Department of Zoology at Stockholm University.

The fossil was a male Paranthropus robustus, a species that existed alongside our early human ancestors as a ‘cousin species’.

Academics from La Trobe University’s Archaeology Department in Melbourne, Australia led the excavation and reconstruction of the large-toothed rare skull from the Drimolen Main Quarry north of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Researchers described the fossil — that was found in 2018 on South African Father’s Day (June 20) — as exciting.

Hell, our own evolution on Earth was pure luck.

In newly published research from Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, scientists study the likelihood of key times for evolution of life on Earth and conclude that it would be virtually impossible for that life to evolve the same way somewhere else.

Continue reading “Intelligent Life Really Can’t Exist Anywhere Else” »

Scientists working with data from the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys’ Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) have discovered a “fossil galaxy” hidden in the depths of our own Milky Way.

This result, published today (November 20, 2020) in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, may shake up our understanding of how the Milky Way grew into the galaxy we see today.

“APOGEE lets us pierce through that dust and see deeper into the heart of the Milky Way than ever before.” —

A new book covers the big personalities, field exploits and scientific clashes behind the discovery of the hominid skeleton nicknamed Ardi.

Viral stowaways could be enhancing survival of algae, and even their evolution.

“We were in the middle of observing one night, with a new spectrograph that we had recently built, when we received a message from our colleagues about a peculiar object composed of a nebulous gas expanding rapidly away from a central star,” said Princeton University astronomer Guðmundur Stefánsson, a member of the team that discovered a mysterious object in 2004 using NASA’s space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX). “How did it form? What are the properties of the central star? We were immediately excited to help solve the mystery!”

A 16-Year-Old Mystery

NASA announced today that it has solved the 16-year-old mystery of the object –similar in size that of a supernova remnant–unlike any they’d seen before in our Milky Way galaxy: a large, faint blue cloud of gas in space with a living star at its center. Subsequent observations revealed a thick ring structure within it, leading to the object being named the Blue Ring Nebula.

Viruses are tiny invaders that cause a wide range of diseases, from rabies to tomato spotted wilt virus and, most recently, COVID-19 in humans. But viruses can do more than elicit sickness — and not all viruses are tiny.

Large viruses, especially those in the nucleo-cytoplasmic large DNA virus family, can integrate their genome into that of their host — dramatically changing the genetic makeup of that organism. This family of DNA viruses, otherwise known as “giant” viruses, has been known within scientific circles for quite some time, but the extent to which they affect eukaryotic organisms has been shrouded in mystery — until now.

“Viruses play a central role in the evolution of life on Earth. One way that they shape the evolution of cellular life is through a process called endogenization, where they introduce new genomic material into their hosts. When a giant virus endogenizes into the genome of a host algae, it creates an enormous amount of raw material for evolution to work with,” said Frank Aylward, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the Virginia Tech College of Science and an affiliate of the Global Change Center housed in the Fralin Life Sciences Institute.

Theories on how the Milky Way formed are set to be rewritten following discoveries about the behavior of some of its oldest stars.

An investigation into the orbits of the Galaxy’s metal-poor stars—assumed to be among the most ancient in existence—has found that some of them travel in previously unpredicted patterns.

“Metal-poor stars—containing less than one-thousandth the amount of iron found in the Sun—are some of the rarest objects in the galaxy,” said Professor Gary Da Costa from Australia’s ARC Center of Excellence in All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D) and the Australian National University.