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Neandertal DNA recovered from cave mud reveals that these ancient humans spread across Eurasia in two different waves.
Analysis of genetic material from three caves in two countries suggests an early wave of Neandertals about 135,000 years ago may have been replaced by genetically and potentially anatomically distinct successors 30,000 years later, researchers report April 15 in
Science. The timing of this later wave suggests potential links to climate and environmental shifts.
By extracting genetic material from mud, “we can get human DNA from people who lived in a cave without having to find their remains, and we can learn interesting things about those people from that DNA,” says Benjamin Vernot, a population geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
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Home > Press > Synthetic biology reinvents development:The research team have used synthetic biology to develop a new type of genetic design that can reproduce some of the key processes that enable creating structures in natural systems, from termite nests to the development of embryos
Petri dish with the bacteria E. coli forming patterns induced by the new synthetic system. Source: Ricard Solé.
Abstract:
Richard Feynman, one of the most respected physicists of the twentieth century, said What I cannot create, I do not understand . Not surprisingly, many physicists and mathematicians have observed fundamental biological processes with the aim of precisely identifying the minimum ingredients that could generate them. One such example are the patterns of nature observed by Alan Turing. The brilliant English mathematician demonstrated in 1952 that it was possible to explain how a completely homogeneous tissue could be used to create
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Credit: BBVA FOUNDATION
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Ecology and Conservation Biology category has gone in this thirteenth edition to ecologists Sandra Díaz (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina, and Argentine National Research Council, CONICET), Sandra Lavorel (Laboratoire d Ecologie Alpine [LECA], Grenoble, France, and Landcare Research, Lincoln, New Zealand) and Mark Westoby (Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia), for expanding the concept of biodiversity, through their pioneering work to discover, describe and coordinate the measurement of plant functional traits.
Independently and collaboratively, the awardees focused their research on arranging each plant s ecosystem function along dimensions of measurable physical traits, such as height, leaf type or seed size, enabling them to locate patterns in the functional diversity of species at a global level. The catalogue of these functional traits has now become a vast database,
Petri dish with the bacteria E. coli forming patterns induced by the new synthetic system. Credit: Ricard Solé. Read Time:
Richard Feynman, one of the most respected physicists of the twentieth century, said What I cannot create, I do not understand . Not surprisingly, many physicists and mathematicians have observed fundamental biological processes with the aim of precisely identifying the minimum ingredients that could generate them. One such example are the patterns of nature observed by Alan Turing. The brilliant English mathematician demonstrated in 1952 that it was possible to explain how a completely homogeneous tissue could be used to create a complex embryo, and he did so using one of the simplest, most elegant mathematical models ever written. One of the results of such models is that the symmetry shown by a cell or a tissue can break under a set of conditions. However, Turing was not able to test his ideas, and it took over 70 years before a breakthrough in bio
Richard Feynman, one of the most respected physicists of the twentieth century, said "What I cannot create, I do not understand". Not surprisingly, many physicists and mathematicians have observed fundamental biological processes with the aim of precisely identifying the minimum ingredients that could generate them. One such example are the patterns of nature observed by Alan Turing.