Freak Frogs Use Bones as Claws
	This weird behavior was observed by biologists from Harvard University in a species of frogs known as Trichobatrachus robustus and is manifested by a break in the bones in the toe pads, forming a new claw-like bone which then penetrates through living tissue, probably as a defense mechanism. David Blackburn from the Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, who discovered the feature, says that similar behavior has been obse ... [read more >>]
	28 May 2008, 05:36GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Cola Is Bad for Your Bones
	Junk food and cola are part of the standard diet for any cool kid. Nevertheless, it turns out that cola is compromising the strength of their bones, as revealed by a new research published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. "There is enough evidence that high consumption of soda and carbonated beverages is associated with somewhat lower bone mass in children, and that's a real concern and people should be ... [read more >>]
	29 April 2008, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Oldest Australian Mammals
	Mammals are supposed to have bloomed after the disappearance of the dinosaur, 65 million-year ago. During the dinosaur times, all mammals must have been shrew-like creatures hiding during the day and only getting out in the night to hunt for insects. But a fossil jawbone of Teinolophos, an 122 million-year old fossil from southeastern Australia, shows that in the middle of the dinosaur era, platypuses already existed, and they are spec ... [read more >>]
	18 April 2008, 09:15GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

A Debunked Myth: Dinosaurs Did not Ram
	They are considered the rams of the dinosaur world. But the dome-headed dinosaurs were able to batter their heads only when teenagers, to avoid brain damage, as revealed by a new research published in the Palaeontologia Electronica journal. The pachycephalosaurs or thick-headed dinosaurs, not very large (up to ... [read more >>]
	29 March 2008, 06:20GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The First Human Ancestor Walking on Two: 6 Million Years Old
	Walking on two feet is one of the main traits of the human being. A new study published in the journal "Nature" shows that the six-million-year-old Kenyan hominin could have been the first species able to walk bipedally, based on bone anatomy. "This provides really solid evidence that these fossils actually belong to an upright-walking early human ancestor," said lead author Brian Richmond, a biological anthropologis ... [read more >>]
	21 March 2008, 04:30GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Mummified Dinosaur Uncovered
	There are mummies which can be older than those of the ancient pharaohs. Some even older than 65 Ma. An amazingly preserved "dinosaur mummy", containing a lot of tissues and bones inside skin wrapping, is being brought to light in North Dakota's state museum. Dakota is an Edmontosaurus, one of the largest duckbilled dinosaurs and was discovered in southwestern North Dakota in 2004. The fossilized skin of the 67-Ma-old dino ... [read more >>]
	20 March 2008, 03:42GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Trove of Ice Age Axes Found on the Bottom of the North Sea
	During the Ice Age, the North Sea was just a grassy plain dwelt by mammoths, deer and ... humans. Now, the Dutch Jan Meulmeester, an amateur archaeologist, has discovered a unique collection of Stone Age hand axes made of material coming from the bottom of the North Sea. 28 axes, possibly up to 100,000 years old, were encountered in marine sand and gravel scooped up by Hanson, a British construction materials company. The axes were acc ... [read more >>]
	18 March 2008, 05:04GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Pterosaurs Had Teen Sex
	These were the first flying vertebrates, and the largest: some had a wingspan of over 10 m (33 ft). But pterosaurs were precocious also from other points of view: they had teen sex, before reaching full size. These are the results of a research published in the journal Biology Letters, which analyzed the growth rings in hundreds of bones belonging to the species Pterodaustro guiñazui that inhabited Argentine 100-million years ... [read more >>]
	13 March 2008, 04:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

When Was the Donkey Domesticated?
	It has been considered that the donkey was domesticated 6,000 years ago, from the African wild ass (Equus asinus), in northeastern Africa, to which it still bears a great resemblance, including the shoulders' "cross" (the wild donkeys of southwestern US and other areas are just feral bewildered animals). But a new research published in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" shows that donkey dome ... [read more >>]
	11 March 2008, 06:02GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Fossil Pygmy Bones Found in Palau
	Nowadays, relict populations of the pygmy race are found not only in central Africa, but also in many parts of southern Asia: Aeta in Philippines, Semang in Malaya, Mani in Thailand, the Andamanese tribes from the Andaman archipelago, Rampasasa from Flores island, and many pygmy tribes also inhabited the mountains of New Guinea or in Vanuatu archipelago. A new research published in the science journal "PLoS ONE" describes pygmy f ... [read more >>]
	11 March 2008, 04:02GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The "Hobbit" of Flores Was Just a Cretin!
	The small 18,000-year-old human skull discovered in Flores Island, Indonesia, in 2003, provoked quite a stir. Many people came up with hypotheses of a new hominid species, Homo floresiensis, that evolved locally from Homo erectus and co-existed with modern humans, Homo sapiens. Others suggested that the skull could have belonged to a person suffering from a genetic condition known as microcephaly ("small head"). The resear ... [read more >>]
	10 March 2008, 03:58GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Beaked Whales Hear Through Their Throats!
	Beaked whales get their name from the shape of their snouts and their large size, but these cetaceans are close-related to dolphins. This family of toothed cetaceans is amongst the least known mammalian families. They measure between 3,4 to 12 m (11 to 40 ft) length and weigh 1 to 15 tones. They make deep dives and feed from the sea floor by suction feeding, without using their teeth (which are in fact deeply reduced in number of down ... [read more >>]
	11 February 2008, 03:28GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Jaw Grown Inside Patient's Belly!
	Science fiction medicine becomes increasingly real. There's still more to wait until seeing penises growing from ears and hearts from legs, but a Finnish team has replaced a 65-year-old patient's upper jaw with a bone obtained from stem cells coming from his own fatty tissue and grown between his bowels. "There have been a couple of similar-sounding procedures before, but these didn't use the patient' ... [read more >>]
	07 February 2008, 06:00GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

10 Things You Did not Know About Bony Fish
	1. Today there are about 21,000 species of bony fish, inhabiting all marine and freshwater environments. Their number is larger than the number of all other vertebrates together. Compare this with about 50 species of lampreys and hagfish (jawless fishes) and about 700 species of sharks and rays (cartilaginous fishes). Of the bony fish, about 6,700 species live in freshwater (33.1 %), 1,625 freshwater species that can live for a time in sa ... [read more >>]
	29 January 2008, 16:36GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Chocolate Is Bad for Your Bones!
	Chocolate may induce more harm than increased fatty deposits on the undesired locations. A new research carried out at the University of Western Australia and published in the "American Journal of Clinical Nutrition" shows that regular chocolate consumption could cause weaker bones and osteoporosis. Female subjects who ate chocolate daily were more likely to have lower bone density than those consuming chocolate less than once p ... [read more >>]
	28 January 2008, 04:09GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Snakes Hear in Stereo Using Their Jaws!
	The classical number of cobra dancing is a spoof. Even if the snakes would be tamed so that they would dance to the sound of the music, they could not do it. They just follow the tamer’s continuous movements of the arms and knees, while he's playing a wind instrument, as snakes don’t even hear the music; snakes detect just sounds with frequencies of 100-500 Hz, and they perceive only ground vibrations through the bones of th ... [read more >>]
	26 January 2008, 05:52GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Women Have Thicker Skulls Than Men!
	Men are bigger than women and they have a reputation as being more thick-headed than the females. And here comes the surprise delivered by a new research published in the International Journal of Vehicle Safety: in fact, women have thicker skulls then men! The team made of researchers from the Ford Motor Co. and Tianjin University of Science and Technology developed a non-invasive method of measuring geometric traits of the hu ... [read more >>]
	25 January 2008, 05:49GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

How Can Sports Be Dangerous for Your Health?
	1. You continuously hear about the health state or the accidents suffered by sport stars. Even you can experience small lesions, a wrench or a muscular contracture without making sport. But, in the case of practicing a sport, even the character of the person can harden the treatment. Many sportsmen, even when amateurs, are eager to return to their favorite activity and do not accept the condemnation to inactivity due to an apparently m ... [read more >>]
	23 January 2008, 02:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

No Testosterone = Bone Fractures
	We associate testosterone with big muscles. Of course, they increase the muscle mass, but do not forget they are also responsible for the bigger bones of the males. And as men experience andropause, this affects not only muscles and sex drive, but bones as well. A new research published in the Archives of Internal Medicine has found that decreased testosterone levels in men over age 60 translates into a higher vulnerability t ... [read more >>]
	15 January 2008, 05:27GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Too Short? This Newfound Gene Could Be Responsible
	Being too short or too tall impacts your welfare, from social life to sex life. That's why, scientists are struggling to find out which are the genes that influence our height. In a research published in the journal "Nature Genetics" and made on over 35,000 subjects, an international team discovered that genes connected to osteoarthritis could have a minor role in determining our height. These genes are found in an area ... [read more >>]
	14 January 2008, 03:33GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

10 Things You Did Not Know About Bones
	1.The scaffold of our body is made of 206 bones, joined through articulations. The largest human bone is the femur (about 50 cm or 20 in long), while the smallest is the stapes (2.6 mm or 0.1 in) from the middle ear. 2.There are 4 categories of bones: long (cylindrical) which are stretched and slightly curbed, having the role of absorbing the shocks; short (cubic) are rugged, thick (like the bones of the wrist); irregular bones with va ... [read more >>]
	04 January 2008, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Longer Ring Finger Means a Bad Knee
	Sex hormones in the womb are known to influence the mind, the fingers and the general development. A new research published in the journal "Arthritis & Rheumatism" has found that women with long ring fingers could have a higher rate of knee arthritis. Normally, women should have index and ring fingers of the same length, while men usually possess longer ring fingers. The new research shows that women with longer ring fin ... [read more >>]
	04 January 2008, 04:50GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

10 Things You Did Not Know About Armadillos
	1.The name of "armadillo" comes from the Spanish "armado" (armored), the name being given after the Spanish conquistadors. 2.Today there are 20 species of armadillos. They evolved in South America and only one species entered North America, the nine-banded armadillo. Living species vary in body length from 12.5 cm (5 in) to 1 m (3.3 ft), but extinct species could be 3 m (10 ft) long and 2 tonnes heavy! ... [read more >>]
	03 January 2008, 08:10GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Where and Why Did Skating Appear?
	The oldest skate crime and Tonya Harding may have lived 5,000 years ago. This is the age of the most ancient archaeological proofs of bone skates (carved of animal bones), which are also the oldest human powered transporting means that have been discovered so far. But, the reason that made people start skating on ice is still not very clear, as ancient bone skates have been discovered in various locations spread across Central an ... [read more >>]
	27 December 2007, 03:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Why Are You too Short or too Tall?
	Being a midget may have produced you a lot of sexual frustration and may have made you wear Prince trade mark hair due and heeled shoes. And neither being lanky proves to be sexy nowadays. In both cases, put it on a damned protein. A new research published in the "Journal of Biological Chemistry", by a team led by Dr. Pierre Moffatt, of the Shriners Hospital for Children, in Montreal, and by McGill University’s De ... [read more >>]
	20 December 2007, 05:58GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Tallest Dog Breed: Irish Wolfhound
	This is the gentle giant of the dogs. The Irish Wolfhound breed has originally been created for wolf hunting, as its look has very few in common with a wolf. There are no more wolves in Ireland today, but they did exist there once. Also, there were wild boars and deer. It seems that the last Irish wolf was hunted 200 years ago. But, the Wolfhound is famous for hunting wolves. During the winter of 1892, a Wolfhound killed 40 wolves on i ... [read more >>]
	04 December 2007, 06:34GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Complete Dinosaur Mummy Found!
	Mummies can go far beyond the era of the ancient pharaohs. Even to the dinosaur era. Researchers have just revealed the discovery of an amazingly preserved "dinosaur mummy", containing a lot of tissues and bones inside skin wrapping, including well preserved tendons and ligaments, which are seldom discovered nowadays, when most dinosaur remains that are found are only scattered bones. The discovery of the 67-million-year-old ... [read more >>]
	04 December 2007, 02:59GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Depression Connected to Bone Loss
	Severe depression can lead to suicide, but milder cases are related not only to mental sufferance: a new National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) research shows that premenopausal women with mild depression experience increased bone mass loss than their non-depressed counterparts, similar to that induced by smoking, low calcium intake and sedentarism. Hip bones (top fracture location amongst elders) displayed the highest thinning in d ... [read more >>]
	28 November 2007, 04:24GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Dinosaurs with 600 Teeth Grazed Like Cows
	Those enormous long-necked dinosaurs are presented like some kind of giraffes of the dinosaur era, devastating tree tops. But a new odd 110-million-year-old species with a vacuum cleaner-like muzzle suggests that not all of them did this, as presented in a new research published online in the journal PLoS One. A team led by Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, discovered this species in south-central Sahara and c ... [read more >>]
	16 November 2007, 04:29GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Dinosaurs Breathed Just Like Birds
	Only few doubt that birds are just living dinosaurs. Besides clues like feathers and similar bones, a new research comes with novel proofs that dinosaurs did resemble birds. The researchers at the University of Manchester point in their article published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences that dinosaurs breathed just like birds. Fossil bones of theropod dinosaurs, like the Velociraptor, from which ... [read more >>]
	07 November 2007, 06:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

How to Copy Nature
	Living organisms have amazing abilities. Toddlers fall and hit their head, older children fall from trees or bikes, sportsmen experience violent fractures, car drivers experience various accidents and we escape in most cases without much damage being done to our bodies. This mix of strength and resistance on relatively low weight is found everywhere in nature. Small trees take toots in cleavages in concrete and rock which they widen as ... [read more >>]
	01 November 2007, 11:25GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Better Cement Bone to Face Car Crashes
	It's less dangerous walking through the jungle than driving a car in a big city. The city traffic clearly produces much more victims. A new study could improve the state of victims of the most severe spinal injuries caused by car crashes. A collaboration between the University of Leeds and Queen’s University Belfast is working in the development of biological cements for fixing ‘burst fractures’ of the spine. Bone cements ... [read more >>]
	30 October 2007, 05:04GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Largest Penis Bone Ever
	If you think this is a mammoth ivory, you're totally wrong! It is the penis bone belonging to an extinct walrus species! The penis' main function is to keep enough stiffness to penetrate an orifice during mating, and to deliver sperm. And mammals found the best solution – most of them have this unique bone named baculum (penis bone, penile bone or os penis) inside their penis. The sole mammals lacking baculum are the ... [read more >>]
	02 October 2007, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Wrist Bone Points to Flores "Hobbit" as a Unique Human Species
	You can imagine the shock of the scientists looking in 2003 for traces of ancient human migration from Asia to Australia to stumble onto a new human species where they least expected: the "hobbit" human species discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores. A vivid debate tried to establish whether the "Flores man" was a dwarfish human species or a diseased Homo sapiens. The grapefruit-size skull made some scientist ... [read more >>]
	24 September 2007, 05:13GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Spectacular Fossil Whale Fall
	A dead zebra in the African savanna means a fiesta for the vultures around. But if we're talking about dead whales, this fiesta can last for decades. And there are specialized marine communities which are adapted for this purpose. This is called whale fall and the first recognized one was in 1989 in southern California. Whale carcasses falling to the deep-ocean floor form an oasis of life in a deserted area, attracting a speciali ... [read more >>]
	21 September 2007, 05:03GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Planet's Sole Bone-Eater
	You may believe that hyena with its formidable bone crushing jaws relies on bones for food. But hyenas are mainly meat eaters. An animal especially evolved to feed on bones is not a mammal, but ... a bird! If vultures are known to strip the meat of the carcasses to the bones, this one will eat bones, too: the bearded vulture or lammergeier. A bearded vulture is impressive through its coloration and size: 3 m (10 ft) in wingspan and a w ... [read more >>]
	20 September 2007, 14:56GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Stem Cells Implant Impairs Sex Life
	Stem cell transplant can save the life of leukemia and lymphoma patients, but this comes with a heavy toll: lowered sexual function. If men are likely to bounce back from this over time, women's sexuality seems to be compromised forever. However, the recovered sexual functions of men or women survivors never reach back the same levels as those of their counterparts who have not experienced cancer. "Survival without a sex lif ... [read more >>]
	19 September 2007, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

A Boom of Mammoth Bone Hunting, Spurred by Permafrost Thawing in the Russian Tundra
	Thousands of years following their extinction, mammoths still help people earn a living. In the Siberian tundra, the frozen grassland high up in the Arctic Circle, the climbing temperature is thawing out the permafrost (the frozen soil) to show off the fossilized bones of prehistoric megafauna like mammoths, woolly rhinos and cave lions. Private collectors and institutes will pay generously for the best specimens. "Last year someon ... [read more >>]
	19 September 2007, 06:39GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Neanderthals Used Toothpicks!
	350,000 to 45,000 years ago, Europe's only humans were the Neanderthals. These people were adapted to a cold climate, having a large braincase, short but robust bodies and large noses, and the males were about 1.65 m tall (5' 5") and inhabited Europe and neighboring areas of western Asia. Even if their brains were larger than ours are, many regard this extinct human as having a less complex behavior than ours. Still, the ... [read more >>]
	12 September 2007, 07:08GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Oldest Modern Ears
	The ear of a fish does not capture the sounds in the air and the first backboned species that conquered the land were largely deaf, lacking the tiny bones that transmitted the airborne sounds to the inner ear. Evolved hearing was believed to have evolved just before the emergence of dinosaurs, about 200 million years ago. Now, a team has discovered that weasel-sized prehistoric reptiles from Russia belonging to a group called Pararepti ... [read more >>]
	12 September 2007, 06:13GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Obesity, Linked to the Bones!
	A big bone means more than just a big hunk. And in fact, the way you look is shaped by your bones more than you would have thought. We already know that bones produce red and white blood cells, store calcium and help control blood pH. But that's more on the story: a new research shows that bones release a protein called osteocalcin involved in controlling sugar and fat absorption, thus acting like a hormone. Gerard Karsenty, a ge ... [read more >>]
	10 August 2007, 02:52GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Arthur's Warriors, Much More Genetically Diverse than Today's English
	Now, we know why English people are so arrogant. Because the plague did not touch the cobby ones. At least the mighty hairy not-so-hygienic Anglo-Saxon warriors were much more genetically diverse than today's Englanders. A new research compared the DNA from ancient and modern English people finding that the country has a smaller genetic diversity than it did one millennium ago. This is different from modern England, regarded as a ... [read more >>]
	09 August 2007, 04:33GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Young Dinosaurs Had Crocodile Skin!
	These beasts made an elephant look like a mouse. Sauropod dinosaurs were big, but the titanosaurs were the biggest of all. Argentinosaurs, a South American titanosaur, was the largest and heaviest land animal ever. It lived in South America during the middle of the Cretaceous Period (around 100 million years ago). Argentinosaurus was 26 m (87 ft) tall and weighed 100 tons, while Bruhathkayosaurus from India could reach 34 m (113 ft) and 18 ... [read more >>]
	31 July 2007, 04:53GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Early Aborigines Ate Hippopotamus-Sized Koalas!
	Today the giants of the Australian fauna are the red kangaroos: males can grow up to 1.8m (6ft) tall and weigh up to 85 kg (187lbs). But they are just a pale copy of the beast that once roamed the continent. Diprotodon, an Ice Age koala's relative, was as big as a hippopotamus! This was the largest marsupial ever. Now Australian researchers say that they have come across the jawbone of a giant Diprotodon the size of ... [read more >>]
	30 July 2007, 05:39GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Meet the World's Tallest and Shortest Individuals!
	This is really interesting: the world’s tallest and shortest living individuals are not only both from China, but also from the same region, Inner Mongolia. Bao Xishun, 56, also named Xi Shun or "The Mast", a 7-foot-9 in herdsman (2.36 m) from Inner Mongolia was confirmed in 2005 by Guinness World Records as the world's tallest living man. Bao has no growth disorder like gigantism; he reached his height in ... [read more >>]
	28 July 2007, 05:57GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia