Imagine you’re a looking for a place to shoot a monster movie. The plot involves animals kept in suspended animation for seven centuries springing back to life. Chances are you wouldn’t pick South Center Lake for your location. The charming 898-acre lake sits on the outskirts of the small town of Lindstrom, Minn., known as America’s Little Sweden. Gothic it’s not.

But in real life, South Center Lake has become the setting for a remarkable resurrection. Scientists have revived shrimp-like animals that have been buried at the bottom of the lake for an estimated 700 years. If this estimate holds up to further testing, they are the oldest animals ever resurrected.

Continue reading “A Living Time Capsule Shows the Human Mark on Evolution” →

The diversity of a tropical rain forest can be hard to fathom for people who have not seen one. Three acres of jungle may be home to more than 650 species of trees — more species than grow in the entire continental United States and Canada combined.

It’s tempting to look at all those species living so close together as a picture of peaceful coexistence. But Phyllis D. Coley and Thomas A. Kursar, a husband-and-wife team of ecologists at the University of Utah, see them as war zones. Hordes of insects threaten the survival of plants, which respond with chemical warfare. The result, they argue, is the remarkable biodiversity we see today.

Continue reading “Battle for Survival May Yield the Rain Forest’s Diversity” →

There are many things that make humans a unique species, but a couple stand out. One is our mind, the other our brain.

The human mind can carry out cognitive tasks that other animals cannot, like using language, envisioning the distant future and inferring what other people are thinking.

The human brain is exceptional, too. At three pounds, it is gigantic relative to our body size. Our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, have brains that are only a third as big.

Continue reading “In the Human Brain, Size Really Isn’t Everything” →

Scientists have extracted the entire genome of a 130,000-year-old Neanderthal from a single toe bone in a Siberian cave, an accomplishment that far outstrips any previous work on Neanderthal genes.

The accuracy of the new genome is of similar quality to what scientists would achieve if they were sequencing the DNA of a living person.

“It’s an amazing technical accomplishment,” said Sarah A. Tishkoff, an expert on human evolution at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the research. “Twenty years ago, I would have thought this would never be possible.”

Continue reading “Toe Fossil Provides Complete Neanderthal Genome” →