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Genetic researchers may have resolved a long-standing dispute by proving there are two species of African elephant.Savannah and forest elephants have been separated for at least three million years, they say, and are as distinct from each other as Asian elephants are from the extinct woolly mammoth. The researchers also made what they say are the first sequences of nuclear DNA from the extinct American mastodon. > "The divergence of the two species took place around the time of the divergence of the Asian elephant and woolly mammoths," said Michi Hofreiter, a specialist in ancient DNA at the UK's York...

The signatures of a bubble collision: A collision (top left) induces a temperature modulation in the CMB temperature map (top right). The “blob” associated with the collision is identified by a large needlet response (bottom left), and the presence of an edge is determined by a large response from the edge detection algorithm (bottom right). Image credit: Feeney, et al.(PhysOrg.com) -- By looking far out into space and observing what’s going on there, scientists have been led to theorize that it all started with a Big Bang, immediately followed by a brief period of super-accelerated expansion called inflation. Perhaps this...

Scientists learn how we find our way By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 20/01/2008 Scientists have discovered why some people get lost more often than others when trying to pick a way through city streets. Researchers have found that two key parts of the brain work together to help humans plan and follow routes in a familiar city. A part of the brain called the hippocampus stores memories about key locations and landmarks while other brain cells - grid cells - provide our internal sense of space and distance, rather like a GPS system. The two parts...

Secret Of Scottish Sheep Evolution Discovered ScienceDaily (Jan. 20, 2008) — Researchers from the University of Sheffield, as part of an international team, have discovered the secret of why dark sheep on a remote Scottish Island are mysteriously declining, seemingly contradicting Darwin's evolutionary theory. Dr Jacob Gratten and Dr Jon Slate, from the University's Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, led the team, which found that the gene responsible for dark coat colour is linked to other genes that reduce an animal's fitness. The researchers looked at coat colour in a feral population of Soay sheep on Hirta in the...

Greenland's ice sheet shrank more rapidly last summer than at any other time in the past 50 years, measurements have shown.< >"The question is: Can we reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in time to make enough of a difference to curb this decay?"< >However, its report acknowledged that temperatures in southern Greenland during the 1930s and 1940s were at least as warm as in recent years.

The chicken egg has been prepped for surgery – a pea-size hole cut in the shell and covered with sticky tape. And now Hans Larsson, a McGill University researcher, removes it from the incubator, places it under a microscope and prepares to operate. He gently peels off the tape and teases back the membranes that line the shell with tweezers. Through the eyepiece, he can see the tiny dot of a heart, steadily beating. He can also see the bud where he implants a milky bead doused in a protein. He hopes it will coax the embryo to grow a...

Parallel universes really do exist, according to a mathematical discovery by Oxford scientists described by one expert as "one of the most important developments in the history of science". The parallel universe theory, first proposed in 1950 by the US physicist Hugh Everett, helps explain mysteries of quantum mechanics that have baffled scientists for decades, it is claimed. In Everett's "many worlds" universe, every time a new physical possibility is explored, the universe splits. Given a number of possible alternative outcomes, each one is played out - in its own universe. A motorist who has a near miss, for instance,...

Source: University Of South Hampton Date: August 30, 2007 Next Ice Age Delayed By Rising Carbon Dioxide Levels Science Daily — Future ice ages may be delayed by up to half a million years by our burning of fossil fuels. That is the implication of recent work by Dr Toby Tyrrell of the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. Future ice ages may be delayed by up to half a million years by our burning of fossil fuels. (Credit: Canadian Ice Service) Arguably, this work demonstrates the most far-reaching disruption of...

Modern Humans, Neanderthals May Have Interbred By E.J. Mundell HealthDay Reporter Mon Oct 30, 5:03 PM ET MONDAY, Oct. 30 (HealthDay News) -- There may be a little Neanderthal in all of us. That's the conclusion of anthropologists who have re-examined 30,000-year-old fossilized bones from a Romanian cave -- bones that languished in a drawer since the 1950s. According to the researchers, these early Homo sapien bones show anatomical features that could only have arisen if the adult female in question had Neanderthal ancestors as part of her lineage. The findings may answer nagging questions: Did modern humans and Neanderthals...