Climate change will dramatically alter life in the oceans, scientists say, but there’s so much still to learn about marine ecosystems that it’s hard to know exactly how.

On Thursday, researchers with the British Antarctic Survey offered a glimpse of that future with the results of an unusual study years in the making.

The scientists heated a patch of the sea floor off the coast of Antarctica and tracked the effects on a few local species. Some animals responded by doubling their growth, stunning the researchers.

Continue reading “Hot Spots in a Freezing Ocean Offer Lessons in Climate Change” →

In Tanzania, not far from the Serengeti, live the Hadza, a community of about 1,300 people. For such a small group, they attract a lot of scientific attention.

Many of the Hadza live solely on the animals they kill, along with honey, berries and a few other wild foods. For the first 95 percent of our species’ history, there was no other way to live.

So the Hadza have been closely scrutinized for clues about the hunter-gatherer way of life: how they find their food, how much energy they use — even how much sleep they get.

Continue reading “Gut Bacteria Can Fluctuate With the Seasons” →

There are some questions in biology that you’d think were settled long ago. For instance: How many types of cells are there in the human body?

“If you just Google this, the number everyone uses is 200,” said Jay Shendure, a geneticist at the University of Washington. “But to me that seems absurdly low.” A number of scientists like him want to build a more complete catalog.

Yet there are an estimated 37 trillion cells in the human body. The traditional ways to identify cell types — such as carefully tracing the shape of individual cells under a microscope — are too slow and crude for the job.

Continue reading “A Speedier Way to Catalog Human Cells (All 37 Trillion of Them)” →

The Mesozoic Era, from 252 million years ago to 66 million years ago, is often called the Age of Dinosaurs. To generations of paleontologists, early mammals from the period were just tiny nocturnal insect-eaters, trapped in the shadows of leviathans.

In recent years, scientists have significantly revised the story. Mammals already had evolved into a staggering range of forms, fossil evidence shows, foreshadowing the diversity of mammals today.

In a study published on Wednesday, a team of paleontologists added some particularly fascinating new creatures to the Mesozoic Menagerie. These mammals did not lurk in the shadows of dinosaurs.

Continue reading “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, Mammals Took to the Skies” →

With fossils and DNA, scientists are piecing together a picture of humanity’s beginnings, an origin story with more twists than anything you would find at the movie theater.

The expert consensus now is that Homo sapiens evolved at least 300,000 years ago in Africa. Only much later — roughly 70,000 years ago — did a small group of Africans establish themselves on other continents, giving rise to other populations of people today.

To Johannes Krause, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human History in Germany, that gap seems peculiar.

Continue reading “In Neanderthal DNA, Signs of a Mysterious Human Migration” →