http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27681984/

Evolution in action: Lizards losing limbs Study: Some Australian skinks have gone legless in just 3.6 million years A Lerista skink, which has a snake-like body, at one time had five fingers. Evolution has resulted in a loss of the species' limbs. Mark Hutchinson LiveScience Obama Could Lift Stem Cell Funding Ban World Needs a Backup Plan The Obama Conspiracies: Truth Will Be Revealed 8 Ways to Green Your Yard What Happens if You Eat Dog Food?   Related stories     What's this? Supernatural science: Why we want to believe   Video gamers are surprisingly fit, says study  Understanding the power of music  U.S. droughts can last for centuries  Scientists grow bigger, better diamonds    Most popular Most viewed Top rated Most e-mailed 2 Dutch men guilty of injecting 14 with HIV Austrian incest father charged with murder City Halls call out for help from Obama Prostitution Scandals of the Rich, Famous & Powerful Police: Fla. girl shot peer in crowded school hall Most viewed on msnbc.com By Robin Lloyd updated 2:23 p.m. ET Nov. 12, 2008 Some slender Australian lizards called skinks have gone from being five-fingered to legless (like most snakes) in just 3.6 million years, a new study finds. That's a blink of an eye in geologic time.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/hobbit/tree.html

WHO'S WHO IN HUMAN EVOLUTION Despite a fragmentary fossil record augmented by rare, sometimes surprising new finds like Homo floresiensis, paleoanthropologists have assembled a very solid general picture of human evolution. In this clickable illustration, follow the trajectory of hominin development as it is currently known. As the illustration makes clear, scientists have traced hominins--that is, species more closely related to humans than to other apes--all the way back through the australopithecines, like the three million-year-old Lucy, to Sahelanthropus tchadensis, who lived over six million years ago. The key feature that all these hominins share is bipedalism, which separates hominins from the primate line that eventually produced today's chimpanzees and other great apes.--Peter Tyson

Short RNAs Show A Long History: MicroRNAs Found In Animals That Appeared A Billion Years Ago

ScienceDaily (Oct. 2, 2008) -- MicroRNAs, the tiny molecules that fine-tune gene expression, were first discovered in 1993. But it turns out they've been around for a billion years.

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See also:

Plants & Animals

• Evolutionary Biology
• Life Sciences
• New Species

Fossils & Ruins

• Origin of Life
• Evolution
• Charles Darwin

Reference

• Parallel evolution
• Animal
• Symbiosis
• Speciation

Evidence reported in Nature on October 1 by scientists in the lab of Whitehead Member and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator David Bartel provides a window into the early evolution of these key regulators, placing their origin within the earliest of animal lineages. The research also suggests that microRNAs present early on have undergone extensive changes, which likely have altered their functions across various lineages.

"This is the first evidence that microRNAs were present within the earliest animal lineages and are not just characteristic of more complex animals," says Andrew Grimson, a postdoctoral fellow in Bartel's lab. Scientists knew that microRNAs existed within bilaterians, an evolutionary group that includes everything from worms to fruit flies to humans, he explains. "Remarkably, we discovered their presence within sponge, a member of the earliest diverging group of animals."

The scientists used high-throughput sequencing to probe samples from animals that diverged before the origin of bilaterian animals. The sponge (Amphimedon queenslandica) represents a group of animals that split off in evolution very early, whereas the starlet sea anemone (Nematostella vectensis) split off more recently.

Public release date: 24-Mar-2008
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Contact: Michele Urie
202-633-2950
Smithsonian

This photo shows the head of the defensive soldier caste of the leaf-cutting ant Atta laevigata, which lives in the savannahs of northern and central South America. The mature nests...

It turns out ants, like humans, are true farmers. The difference is that ants are farming fungus.

Entomologists Ted Schultz and Seán Brady at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History have published a paper in the March 24 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, providing new insight into the agricultural abilities of ants and how these abilities have evolved throughout time. Using DNA sequencing, the scientists were able to construct an “evolutionary tree” of fungus-growing ants, which revealed a single pioneering ancestor that discovered agriculture approximately 50 million years ago.
Click here for more information.http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/s-snm032408.php

Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Mixing Mammals
Putting bat DNA into mice sheds light on how limbs evolved.
By Anna Davison

Batmouse: Scientists gave mice the bat version of a piece of DNA that boosts activity of a gene involved in limb development. The mice had slightly longer limbs than their normal counterparts, demonstrating the subtle force of evolution.
Credit: Technology Review

By outfitting mice with a chunk of DNA that directs wing development in bats, scientists have created rodents with abnormally long forelimbs, mimicking one of the steps in the evolution of the bat wing. Their work gives weight to the idea that variations in how genes are controlled, and not just mutations in the coding regions of genes, are a driving force in evolution.

The slightly longer forelimbs of the transgenic mice "make them more batlike," says Nipam Patel, a professor of molecular and cell biology and integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the work. "It seems like a subtle difference, but evolution works by these subtle differences."

....http://scienceblogs.com/laelaps/2007/12/evolutions_arrow.php
The evolution of life on earth has no direction and no predetermined end; what is adaptive today might not be tomorrow, and the scores of extinct creatures preserved in the rocks of this planet attest to an ongoing process that results in what Charles Darwin rightly called "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful." The man hailed as the co-discover of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, would not agree with my opening remarks, though. While Wallace contributed much to biological science in his own right, the incorporation of anthropocentric spiritualism into his hypotheses caused a good deal of controversy amongst naturalists concerned with evolution, and at least in terms of our own species Wallace favored a teleological view of evolution that involved some sort of supernatural intervention several times in the history of life on earth. Such beliefs are likely a large part of the reason why Darwin is most closely associated with evolution and Wallace often remains a footnote, and while this might not be entirely just in light of Wallace's other contributions to areas like biogeography his allowances for the supernatural to intervene in the process of evolution got under the skin of other scientists of the time. Even so, ides of a teleological or orthogenic process of evolution survived and even thrived for a time, and even today debates over whether evolution is "directed" or not remain.

Before proceeding further, though, it would perhaps be wise to take a moment to define what I mean by direction in evolution. The term "direction" alone is ambiguous, so for the purposes of this essay I'm going to take it to mean that direction means that a process is imbued with some sort of purpose or progresses towards an end point, even if that end point is transitory and leads to the continuation of the process in a new direction. Such a view was probably best expressed in the somewhat strange views of the Jesuit preist and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. In the last chapter of The Phenomenon of Man, de Chardin reflects a progression of humans towards an "Omega Point" which would be an intellectual and spiritual leap forward to a new level.
......

Home » Technology & Science » Science

Scientists found bee fossil with flower's pollen stuck on its back

Scientists believe orchids were around when dinosaurs live after finding this bee fossil carrying pollen on its back.
Santiago Ramirez / Santiago Ramirez
LiveScience
Orchids likely bloomed when dinosaurs lived

Fossils, Fish, Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Paleontology, Origin of Life
Coelacanth Fossil Sheds Light On Fin-to-limb Evolution
....
Science Daily — A 400 million-year-old fossil of a coelacanth fin, the first finding of its kind, fills a shrinking evolutionary gap between fins and limbs. University of Chicago scientists describe the finding in the July/August 2007 issue of Evolution & Development.

The coelacanth fossil, Shoshonia arctopteryx, is 400 million years old. (Credit: Matt Friedman)

The fossil shows that the ancestral pattern of lobed fins closely resembles the pattern in the fins of primitive living ray-finned fishes, according to the scientists.

“This ends intense debate about the primitive pattern for lobed fins, which involves the ancestry of all limbs, including our own,” said author Michael Coates, Ph.D., associate professor of organismal biology and anatomy at Chicago.

According to the researchers, the fossil’s pattern is similar to the branching arrangement still embedded in the fins of paddlefishes, sturgeons and sharks.“To understand the developmental evolution of the limbs of tetrapods [four-limbed vertebrates], we shouldn’t be looking at the fins of our nearest living fish relatives—lungfishes and coelacanths—because they’re far too specialized,” Coates said.

“Part of the reason why this is an interesting discovery is that people think of coelacanths animals as archetypal living fossils,” said Matt Friedman, evolutionary biology graduate student at Chicago and lead author of the paper. “But it’s a common misconception. If you look deep in the fossil record to the first members of that group, they are really different and very diverse.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070731152131.htm

www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2007-04-08-russians-space_N.htm

RB N'est-ce pas un phénomène "semblable" qui a permis à l'ichtyostega" de quitter l'eau pour des séjours sur la terre il y a quelque 300 millions d'années (devonien)

Despite space tourism, Russians worry about lagging in space race
Posted 17h 58m ago | Comments 1 | Recommend 7 E-mail | Save | Print |

Government spending on the Russian space program has since increased thanks to an oil-driven economic boom, but the space industry still lacks money to design replacements for its Soviet-designed boosters and vehicles.
By Vladimir Isachenkov, Associated Press
MOSCOW — It looks like a bonanza for the Russian space industries — the planned retirement of the U.S. space shuttle fleet in about three years would make Russia the principal carrier of crews and cargo to the international space station, sharply raising its revenues.
But some Russian cosmonauts and space experts are worried. They fear the lead will be short-lived and will slow development of what's really needed — a replacement for the veteran Soyuz spacecraft, the reliable but plodding workhorse of the nation's space program for 40 years.

A Soyuz blasted off over the weekend from the Baikonur cosmodrome carrying two cosmonauts to the international space station, along with Charles Simonyi, a U.S. software billionaire who paid $20 million to 25 million for a 13-day trip to the station and back.

SPACE TOURIST: Simonyi blasts off
Russia currently builds two Soyuz spacecraft a year for manned launches, and four unmanned Progress cargo ships. The fleet is expected to expand to four Soyuz and seven Progress vehicles starting in 2010. Unlike the United States' three space shuttles, they can only be used once.

Edge Search
In a larger sense, social cognition is an extreme example of a broader issue in biology of mind, and that is social interaction in general. Even here we are beginning to make some rather remarkable progress. Cori Bargmann, a geneticist at the Rockefeller University, has studied two variants of a worm called C elegans, that differ in their feeding pattern. One variant is solitary and seeks its food alone; the other is social and forages in groups. The only difference between the two is one amino acid in an otherwise shared receptor protein. If you move the receptor from a social worm to a solitary worm, it makes the solitary worm social.

A NEUROSCIENCE SAMPLING [3.5.07]
By Eric R. Kandel

Introduction

In keeping with the theme of this year's Question: "What Are You Optimistic About", Edge asked neuroscientist and Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel for a sampling of recent developments in neuroscience that inspire his optimism. "in a field as broad and as deep as neuroscience," he writes, "it is difficult to select simply four contributions. I therefore consider this a sampling of the contributions that drive my optimism rather than a true selection of the top four. Moreover, I have simplified the task by dividing the field into four areas: Molecular Neuroscience, Systems Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Neuroscience of Psychiatric Disease."

— JB

ERIC R. KANDEL is University Professor at Columbia University in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics and in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia and a Senior Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2000. He is the author In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind.

www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kandel07/kandel07_index.html