Genes Reveal the Ancient Battle Between Man and Virus
	Viruses have always been part of our evolutionary process, constantly mutating in order to defeat the immune system, at the same time triggering changes in the structure of the DNA, which eventually gave us defense mechanisms that still work today. Some types of viruses, known as retroviruses, even have the capability of inserting themselves into the DNA, leaving traces of their existence in our genes. Such an ancient retrovir ... [read more >>]
	22 July 2008, 10:47GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Evolution Favors Large Species
	With the help of data regarding the fossils of as much as 4,000 known species of mammals that lived on Earth up to 60 million years ago, Aaron Clauset of the Santa Fe Institute and Douglas Erwin of the National Museum of Natural History created one of the most accurate computer models that estimates how the body size of mammals evolved in the last 50,000 years or so. Computer model predictions indicate that mammals tend to get bigger with ... [read more >>]
	18 July 2008, 10:43GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Tasmanian Devils Fend Off Cancer by Breeding Early
	Fatal facial cancer tumors have been ravaging the Tasmanian devil populations ever since the mid 1990s, killing up to one third of the total number of the world's largest surviving carnivorous marsupials in the last decade or so. The fatal devil facial tumour disease (which in Tasmanian devils is probably spread during fights), along with the venereal sarcoma (which is passed among dogs during mating), are the only known tumor disease ... [read more >>]
	15 July 2008, 05:20GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Likely Ancestor of Modern Flatfish Found
	The fossils of a fish that might have lived in the shallow reef waters of Europe some 50 million years ago, have been recently identified by researchers as belonging to a possible ancestor for modern flatfish. But unlike modern flatfish which have the eyes on one side of the head and which swim on their sides along the seafloor, the fossils appear to indicate that the fish had one eye on one side of the head and the other atop the skull, s ... [read more >>]
	11 July 2008, 07:32GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

How Our Brain Will Evolve in the Future
	The brain's ability to make fast decisions in threatening situations may sometimes literally make the difference between life and death. In our more primitive past this would have translated into fast decisions destined to help us escape from the claws of a predator; the situation is analogue even today, even if the nature of the threat might have changed in time. Most researchers believe that the brain of mammals contain ... [read more >>]
	09 July 2008, 06:31GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Funcom Plans Age of Conan Evolution
	With Age of Conan slowly turning into a phenomenon, Funcom and Eidos plan to use the momentum and build on the initial success to make sure their hit MMORPG will continue to gather as many players as possible. And we all know that there is no better way to do ... [read more >>]
	16 June 2008, 12:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Evolution Unravels Itself in Front of Researcher's Eyes
	Some two decades ago researcher Richard Lenski of the Michigan State University started growing 12 laboratory populations out of a single Escherichia coli bacterium, which has evolved for over more than 44,000 generations ever since, thus accumulating even more genetic mutations. Although all 12 populations evolved separately they seemed to present similar features, experiencing a rise in growth rate and a decrease in numbers, until the 31 ... [read more >>]
	11 June 2008, 06:59GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Spore System Requirements Officially Unveiled
	Electronic Arts has officially released the minimum system requirements for Will Wright's highly anticipated evolution sim / God game Spore. A Mac – PC spec comparison reveals that Windows users have it their way, as far as video goes, while PowerPC Mac owners (G3/G4/G5) ... [read more >>]
	11 June 2008, 06:05GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Bow and Arrow Evolved through Trial and Error
	People don't give much thought today to the trials and error experiments that led us to the current technological advancement, but it looks as if humans were masters in such experimentation especially at the time when the bow and arrow first appeared and started to be used for hunting and fighting. The variety of projectile points found and dated around that time show that humans had first started perfecting these weapons by experimen ... [read more >>]
	11 June 2008, 04:26GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Missing Link Between Frogs and Salamanders May Have Been Found
	The fossil of an animal that lived on Earth some 290 million years ago, having features resembling those of frogs and salamanders alike, has been found during the 1990s in Texas by a paleontologist and colleagues from the Smithsonian Institution. The fossil remained in the collection of the National Museum of Natural History until 2005, when it was rediscovered by at team of researchers from the University of Calgary who identified it as a ... [read more >>]
	22 May 2008, 05:33GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

New Telescope Camera Will Search for Wandering Stars
	Case Western Reserve University researchers using new charge coupled device instrumentation are now able to view deeper and wider in the night sky than previously thought possible. CCDs are highly sensitive light sensors similar to those used by today's digital cameras. The new device was designed and installed on the Burrel Schmidt telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory by astronomer Paul Harding from the Case Western Reserve an ... [read more >>]
	20 May 2008, 10:47GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

No Difference between Walking and Climbing for Small Primates
	Duke University has shown in a recent experiment that small primates use up roughly the same amount of energy while climbing as they do while walking. The new finding could reveal why the tiny human ancestors chose to live a life in the trees more than 65 million years ago. The study involved five different species of primates, working their way on vertical and horizontal treadmills. "We assumed it would be more energetic ... [read more >>]
	16 May 2008, 10:12GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

New Family Tree for Humans
	Geometry has changed our family tree. A new computer analysis published in the journal Nature re-drew evolutionary links between extinct humans, apemen and us. The team led by Dr Rolando González-José of the Centro Nacional Patagónico-CONICET, Puerto Madryn, Argentina employed 4 geometric measurements from human and ape fossil skulls, assessing variables like skull roundness and facial retraction. The researchers analyzed 20 skulls bel ... [read more >>]
	15 May 2008, 03:24GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Short History of Horses' Evolution
	Of all the domestic animals, the horses have been permanently associated with the progresses of human culture and civilization. It boosted human trade, migrations and conquests. The era of the technology let the role of the horse obsolete. The horse was domesticated in the Asian steppes. Today, the genus Equus, comprising the horse, has 7 species: horse (E. caballus), donkey and African wild ass (E. asinus), onager or Asian w ... [read more >>]
	26 March 2008, 11:32GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Fastest Evolving Animal: Tuatara
	The tuatara is by far the oldest reptile inhabiting the planet, a living fossil that survived isolated in the New Zealand, protected from competition and predation of other animal groups. Surprisingly, a DNA analysis published in the journal "Trends in Genetics," carried out by a team led by evolutionary biologist and ancient DNA expert Professor David Lambert at the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, has c ... [read more >>]
	21 March 2008, 05:00GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Neozoic, the Era of the Mammals
	When dinosaurs went extinct, the Neozoic (New life age) started. Life evolved towards what we experience today. 1. Paleogene (65-23 Ma) was the epoch when small mammals evolved to the high diversity we know today. Many groups perished without descendants. Birds and snakes, too, diversified greatly. The clime was somehow cooler and drier. The Paleogene period was made of three epochs: Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene. The real ... [read more >>]
	17 March 2008, 16:51GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

White People Are Less Genetically Diverse Than Black (African) People
	Europe may be called the Old Continent, but its current population has a rather recent origin. And a new research published in the journal "Nature" shows that white European people are less genetically diverse, carrying more harmful mutations, than the black Africans. The results point that a population "bottleneck" could have been involved in the original colonization of Europe or the evolution of the white race. P ... [read more >>]
	21 February 2008, 03:48GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

New 582 Genes Humans Have Evolved in the Last 60,000 Years!
	We migrated from Africa about 100,000 years ago and, since then, we have colonized the whole Earth, adapting to new environments and diets. It is clear that this accelerated an evolution in our physical traits, in the genes connected to skin color or stature, as means of adaptation to novel habitats. A new research published in the journal "Nature Genetics," by a French-Spanish team, has detected no less then 582 ge ... [read more >>]
	08 February 2008, 05:24GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Languages Behave Like Biological Species
	Languages behave just like species. This is the conclusion of a new research published in the Nature journal, showing that languages evolve in fits and starts, rather than gradually, a phenomenon called punctuated evolution in biology. The idea is not that new, but the British team employed mathematics to show this is real in the case of the language evolution. The team led by evolutionary biologist Quentin Atkinson and mathe ... [read more >>]
	04 February 2008, 05:01GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

12 Dinosaur Facts and Records
	1.The name "dinosaur" comes from Old Greek "deinos" ("terrible") and "saurus" ("lizard"), and was advanced by Richard Owen in 1841. The dinosaurs emerged at the end of the Triassic, about 225 million years ago, from a group of reptiles called Archosauria. Archosauria was a sister group to lizards and they gave birth both to dinosaurs and crocodiles. Eryhtrosuchus was a typical archosaur ... [read more >>]
	14 January 2008, 17:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Mountains' Uplift Created Man
	Humans evolved from apes in a savanna environment. But what forced this environmental change? In a study published in the journal "Geotimes", a husband-and-wife team of geologists, at the University of Utah, shows that the uplift of the mountains from East Africa determined our emergence on Earth. "Tectonics [movement of Earth’s crust] was ultimately responsible for the evolution of humankind", wrote Royhan and Nah ... [read more >>]
	20 December 2007, 04:41GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Why Don't Pregnant Women Lose Balance?
	You may wonder how pregnant women, with those continuously growing bellies, don't lose balance, toppling over. A new Harvard research published in "Nature" has found some evolutionary tricks: slight differences from men in the lower backs and hip joints enable women to cope with pregnancy. And the adaptive pattern was spotted only in women and the females of our immediate ancestors who were bipedal (walked on two feet), but ... [read more >>]
	13 December 2007, 03:58GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Humans Are Evolving Faster than Ever Now!
	If you think that human evolution has stopped, you're extremely wrong: in fact, it has just sped up! And people on various continents are just turning more different. "Humans are evolving rapidly, and that the pace of change has accelerated a lot in the last 40,000 years, especially since the end of the Ice Age roughly 10,000 years ago," said Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology, at the University of ... [read more >>]
	07 December 2007, 04:48GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

James Webb Ready for Action
	The James Webb Space Telescope is one of the space telescopes of the new generation that will be flown into Earth's orbit. Scheduled to launch no earlier than June 2013, the telescope has recently passed the preliminary design review made of the Optical Telescope Element, which will be the telescope's 'eyes'. The OTE is formed of a primary mirror 6.5 meters in diameter, secondary, tertiary mirror and the fine steering m ... [read more >>]
	04 December 2007, 08:40GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Evolution
	I don’t know exactly where to start from? The word "cool" could be an idea, but it wouldn’t be suggestive enough. This week's game is more than neat, it’s simply excellent. With a strange theme, something that not all games around can brag about, Evolution transforms you into an underwater organic life form, which must survive the attacks of other, more evolved life forms. It’s good to know that quick reflexes are a mu ... [read more >>]
	23 November 2007, 17:31GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Is This the Common Ancestor of Humans/Chimps/Gorillas?
	The lack of fossils had forced scientists to make complicated hypotheses about how apes emerged in Africa 22 million years ago, migrated to Europe and Asia, disappeared from Africa, migrated back in Africa from Europe and from that lineage humans, chimps and gorillas appeared. But a new 10-million-year old jaw bone and 11 teeth found in the eastern edge of the Kenyan Rift Valley of Kenya simplifies this entangled theory and s ... [read more >>]
	13 November 2007, 05:27GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

10 Amazing Facts about Human Speech
	1.The speech skill is a wonder. To produce a phrase, about 100 muscles of the chest, neck, jaw, tongue and lips must collaborate. Each muscle is a bundle made of hundreds or thousands of fibers. For the coordination of these muscles much more neurons than necessary are required for contracting the muscles from an athlete's feet. Just one motor neuron can trigger movement in the 2,000 muscular fibers existent on a calf muscle. But the ... [read more >>]
	09 November 2007, 14:56GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Our Teeth - 165 Million Years Old
	Your teeth pattern rooted within the first reptiles struggling to turn into mammals. A new fossil mammal species from the Jurassic era, during the full blown dinosaur evolution, reveals that the basic tooth pattern encountered in all mammal species today emerged independently at least twice in the past, and also points that early mammals were much varied than previously believed. The remains of Pseudotribos robustus were discovered in 1 ... [read more >>]
	01 November 2007, 03:48GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Future of Humanity: Larger Penises and Pert Breasts
	If you think that human evolution has just stopped, you're wrong. Not only are we still in the middle of a vivid evolution, but in 100,000 years, we will be split into two species: a sexy, intelligent power-detaining elite and an underclass of low intelligence, ugly dwarf humanoids. This is what Dr. Oliver Curry, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, believes that sexual selection will induce in humans. Hi ... [read more >>]
	29 October 2007, 15:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Why Do Sex Chromosomes Change So Quickly?
	Being male or female is decided from the womb. And in most cases, the key is held by sex determination genes on the sex chromosomes. The genes connected to sexual development have evolved remarkably little along the evolutionary of our race. Opposite sex determining genes, sex chromosomes are among the most fast changing bodies of the genome. The team made by Sander van Doorn (Santa Fe Institute, USA) and Mark Kirkpatrick (University o ... [read more >>]
	22 October 2007, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

How Does Language Evolve?
	Language is a living organism. And just as any living organism, it experiences evolution. Will we be able to understand the English of the year 3,000? It seems that at least at a basic level, the answer is positive. The words which are used the most in everyday language are the most conservative, as found by two new researches. A Harvard team investigated the evolution of English verb conjugations over a 1,200-year period while a team a ... [read more >>]
	22 October 2007, 03:30GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

100 Million Touchscreen Phones Next Year
	ABI Research has just revealed the results of a recent study coming from them. It looks like year 2008 will be a great one for boosting the touchscreen handset production. More than 100 million such devices are expected to ship until the end of next year. Apple& ... [read more >>]
	28 September 2007, 09:20GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Men with Deep Voices Father More Children
	Now we know why Barry White was nicknamed "The Walrus of Love". A new research found that men with lower-pitched voices father more children than those with high-pitched voices. Women found in the fertile period seem to select men with low-pitched voices. Previously, the team led by David Feinberg, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behavior at McMaster University, revealed that women percei ... [read more >>]
	26 September 2007, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

9 Things You Did not Know about the Chinese and Mongoloid Race
	About 200,000 years ago, in Eastern Africa a Homo group started the evolution towards Homo sapiens, the modern human. About 100,000 years ago, modern humans entered South Asia and by 70,000 years ago they were present in southern China. 40,000 years ago, they entered Europe and this ancestral type was called "Cro-Magnon". About 55,000 humans from southern Asia entered Australia. But all these groups are not what we see today in C ... [read more >>]
	21 September 2007, 14:31GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Anti-Viruses Are Never Going to Die!
	I was reading the press on the web when I stumbled upon an article on the future of anti-viruses and whether they do have a future or not. For a moment I asked myself the same question – do they have a future? Sure they do! As long as cyber-threats exist, so will AVs. It’s just about ... [read more >>]
	20 September 2007, 08:41GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Virus Review
	The first computer virus was written before some of you were even born. Since then, about 25 years have passed and the virus "market" has changed a lot. At the beginning there were just "Hey, look how cool I am" viruses. They weren't the type of malware that would screw up your PC, they were somewhat harmless. All they were doing was promoting a certain message or prompting you from time to time with the creator� ... [read more >>]
	03 September 2007, 03:23GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

New African Fossils Further Complicate Human Evolution
	We are more than an odd ape. We are odd as a species due to the fact that we are just one human species. Usually, only living fossils and relicts are represented by just one isolated species. Now, a pair of fossils recently found in Kenya show that once more than just one human species lived side by side. It was believed that there was a successive progression: Homo habilis gave rise to Homo erectus, whose African type, H. ergaster, ev ... [read more >>]
	09 August 2007, 03:00GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Top 10 Extinct Humans
	With the emergence of the genus Homo, we evolved from the stage of ape-man to that of humans. But do not think that we passed from one species to another and the final result is Homo sapiens. The genus Homo produced various species, of which only Homo sapiens survived till today. At a given moment, there were more than one species of Homo on the planet, till very recently, with the total extinction of the Neanderthals. These are the fossi ... [read more >>]
	08 August 2007, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Top 10 Ape-Men
	The evolution from ape to man is a complicated one, as there was not a direct line from our earliest ancestor to us, but a branched one, with many dead ramifications. Various families of primates differentiated 25-28 MA years ago (thus the oldest apes have this age) and the genera differentiation of the primates is no older than 7-11 MA. In fact, during our evolution, at a certain moment, the Earth was populated by more than one hominid at ... [read more >>]
	06 August 2007, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

When Did Humans Get Talky?
	The first human slang could have been a rudimentary system of visual, tactile and auditive calls, resembling animal communication. But when we acquired the ability of representing objects through symbols and communicate to another individual our own mental creations, we turned ourselves different from the rest of the living things. Speech had 'emerged'. The skill of articulating words with meaning fascinated the phi ... [read more >>]
	04 August 2007, 06:48GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Oldest Human Ever Found: 7 Million Years Old
	When Toumai ("Hope of Life" in the local Goran language) was found in Chad (Africa), that changed all the theories about human evolution. This ape-like human lived 7 million years ago in a forested area, sharing its habitat with other monkeys and apes and always alert to cats, crocodiles and pythons. It spent probably some time in the trees and perhaps walked upright. Anyhow, if we saw one, we would believe it is just a chimp. ... [read more >>]
	02 August 2007, 14:31GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

What's the Origin of Human Languages?
	This is really ambitious: a project attempting to track down all human language to a common oldest language ever, "alive" 50,000 years ago. It is then when Homo sapiens, who had emerged at least 150,000 years before, suddenly changed behavior. Until then, Homo sapiens was not very different from the Neanderthals. Both buried their dead, employed stone tools, and had some form of communication, mostly gestural. "Almost ove ... [read more >>]
	23 July 2007, 05:51GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Top 10 Penises
	Penises are strongly connected to the war between sexes. Only animals with internal fecundation have a penis, no matter if they lay eggs or deliver living offspring. A penis' main goal is to insert the sperm inside the female body to fertilize the eggs. Internal fecundation is a must for terrestrial breeding animals but it also evolved in some aquatic lineages: cephalopods (squids, octopuses, cuttlefish), snails (the terrestrial on ... [read more >>]
	21 July 2007, 12:11GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Dinosaurs Took Control Smoothly
	Dinosaurs are regarded as the extreme beasts and totally dominating lords of their time, one of the highest stages of life's evolution. But fossils found in New Mexico suggest that dinosaurs required some time to get rid of their evolutionary cousins, the dinosauromorhs ("dinosaur like" reptiles) and turn into the dominant land animals on Earth, a gradual ascent rather than a quick takeover. "Up to now, paleontologi ... [read more >>]
	20 July 2007, 05:02GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Science vs. Faith?
	So far, scientists haven't found a way to talk to the faithful about science: is the goal to teach science or to discredit religion? Can the two worldviews ever enrich each other? Is there a middle-ground between the two? Lawrence M. Krauss is a physicist, an Ambrose Swasey Professor and director of the Center for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics at Case Western Reserve University. He argues in favor of teachin ... [read more >>]
	18 June 2007, 04:23GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Most Primitive Language?
	All languages are supposed to derive from an ancestral sole language. Or at least they followed some strict grammar rules during their evolution, as synthesized by the Universal Grammar (UG), which made famous in the 1960s Noam Chomsky, MIT professor of linguistics. Now a vivid debate was started by the work of Daniel L. Everett, a linguist at Illinois State University, who has lived several decades studying Pirahã, the lang ... [read more >>]
	24 April 2007, 06:07GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

When Did Our Ancestors Stop Laying Eggs?
	You could have been born weighing a few grams and as big as a bean or yuckier from a soft-shelled egg... But instead of carrying you into a marsupium, your mother delivered a 3-5 kg (8-13 pounds) hunk, resembling a human being (more or less). That's because she fed you through an organ called placenta (“pie” in Latin) while inside her womb. In fact, most modern mammals are placental (they possess a placenta and g ... [read more >>]
	18 April 2007, 06:33GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Monkeys Share 93% of Their Genes with Us
	Some anthropologists name the human species “the beautiful ape” or “the beautiful monkey”. Looking at some of our counterparts, I seriously doubt this, but what I really do not doubt is that we are a type of monkey. And the first monkey whose genome has been sequenced, the rhesus macaque, confirms it: we share 93 % of our genes. This primate could be the most common employed in lab researches, due to many of their characteristics. ... [read more >>]
	13 April 2007, 06:27GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

How Did the Early Humans Enter the Caves? Chimps Explain...
	A new astonishing finding explains us the origin of the behavior of our ancestors of employing caves as shelter. Recently, a team from Iowa State University led by anthropologist Jill Pruetz had signaled in savanna chimpanzees from Senegal the habit of employing sharpened sticks to hunt small animals (particularly bush-babies). Now the same team discovered on the same chimp population at Fongoli the ape's behavior of shelterin ... [read more >>]
	11 April 2007, 02:56GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Oldest Homo Sapiens from China Inter-bred with the Ape-Men
	The classical theory says that Homo sapiens emerged about 100,000 years ago in Africa and about 50-60,000 years ago started to spread out of Africa, colonizing the entire planet. Homo sapiens would have wiped out all the pre-existent more archaic Homo species from Eurasia, and this way, our species ensured itself a huge place under the sun. But a new research led by Erik Trinkausa, professor of anthropology at Washington University ... [read more >>]
	03 April 2007, 06:43GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia