For more than 1,000 years, the Inupiat people of Alaska have hunted bowhead whales in the Arctic Ocean. Over the centuries, they grew to appreciate the long lives of the animals, the longest-living mammals on Earth. Generations of hunters could recognize the same individual at sea. Inupiat captains have told researchers that a bowhead whale lives two human lifetimes.

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Hundreds of scientists have joined together to save a group of species from extinction, a group that might not seem like it needs saving: microbes.

Microbes need protection for many reasons, researchers say, including the fact that other species — indeed, entire ecosystems — depend on their well-being. “We need them in order to help conserve the pandas and the rainforests and the whales and the oceans and everything else in between,” said Jack Gilbert, a microbiologist at the University of California, San Diego.

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Kim Ballare: In graduate school, I fell in love with bees and other pollinators. They’re so important to our functioning ecosystem, but they’re really unknown to a lot of people. Most people just think about the European honeybee, which is not a native species in the United States. But there are 4,000 species of bees in the United States, and their diversity and their different functions are fascinating. My main species focus during my Ph.D. was on the Eastern Carpenter bee, which is huge — bigger than a bumblebee — and make their nests by chewing into wood with their little jaws.

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Most people know Jane Goodall, who died Wednesday, as a silver-haired conservationist who chatted with Stephen Colbert and gave speeches to the United Nations in defense of nature. For scientists, however, it’s the young Jane Goodall who followed wild chimpanzees for weeks at a time who endures as an icon.

“There will always only be one Jane Goodall,” said Michael Tomasello, an expert on the origin of language at Duke University.

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About 360 million years ago, our fishy ancestors moved from water to land. Along the way, their fins turned into feet, with toes. And hundreds of millions of years later, the front pair evolved into hands.

To understand this profound evolutionary transformation, scientists have spent decades studying the fossils of extinct fish that sported limb-like fins. They have also compared the embryos of modern-day fish and land vertebrates to understand how their fins and limbs develop.

Continue reading “How Did Hands Evolve? The Answer Is Behind You.” →