Category Archives: Medicinal News

Why are there so many types of lizards?

Lizards have special superpowers. While birds can regrow feathers and mammals can regrow skin, lizards can regenerate entire structures such as their tails. Despite these differences, all have evolved from the same ancestor as lizards.

Spreading through the Americas, one lizard group, the anoles, evolved like Darwin's finches, adapting to different islands and different habitats on...

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Playing both ends: Amphibian adapted to varied evolutionary pressures

Caecilians are serpent-like creatures, but they're not snakes or giant worms. The limbless amphibians, related to frogs and salamanders, favor tropical climates of Africa, Asia and the Americas. Most live in burrows of their own making; some are aquatic.

With colleagues from Brazil, Utah State University ecologist Edmund "Butch" Brodie, Jr. reports caecilians feature greatly enlarged...

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Monkey Vocabulary Decoded

From short 'tsiks' and 'ekks' to drawn-out 'phees' -- all the sounds produced by marmoset monkeys are made up of individual syllables of fixed length: that is the result of a study by a team of researchers headed by Dr. Steffen Hage of the Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuro-science (CIN) at the University of...

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Surprising new study redraws family tree of domesticated and 'wild' horses

There are no such things as "wild" horses anymore.

Research published in Science today overturns a long-held assumption that Przewalski's horses, native to the Eurasian steppes, are the last wild horse species on Earth. Instead, phylogenetic analysis shows Przewalski's horses are feral, descended from the earliest-known instance of horse domestication by the Botai people of northern...

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In living color: Seeing cells from outside the body with synthetic bioluminescence

Glowing creatures like fireflies and jellyfish are captivating to look at but also a boon for science, as their bioluminescent molecules contribute to visualizing a host of biological processes. Now, scientists in Japan have supercharged these molecules, making them hundreds of times brighter in deep tissues and allowing for imaging of cells from outside the...

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