An international team of scientists, led by geneticists from Trinity College Dublin, have sequenced the genomes from ancient goat bones from areas in the Fertile Crescent where goats were first domesticated around 8,500 BC. They reveal a 10,000-year history of local farmer practices featuring genetic exchange both with the wild and among domesticated herds, and...
Spleen microbes of wild animals change with tick-borne illness
Anaplasmosis, a tick-borne febrile disease, can be carried by wild mammals before being transmitted to humans through a tick bite. Now, researchers reporting in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases have found that Anaplasma bacteria alter the patterns of other microbes in the spleens of mice and shrews.
The spleen, in mammals, acts as a blood filter. While...
First dogs in the Americas arrived from Siberia, disappeared after European contact
A study reported in the journal Science offers an enhanced view of the origins and ultimate fate of the first dogs in the Americas. The dogs were not domesticated North American wolves, as some have speculated, but likely followed their human counterparts over a land bridge that once connected North Asia and the Americas, the...
Invaluable to the medical industry, the horseshoe crab is under threat
Blood from horseshoe crabs is essential for many drug, implant and environmental safety tests -- but blood harvesting, together with capture for bait and impacts from climate change and habitat destruction, is threatening populations of these "living fossils." A review published in Frontiers in Marine Science highlights that these continuing threats will detrimentally affect the...
A breakthrough to rescue the Northern White Rhino
Northern White Rhinos (NWR) are functionally extinct, as only two females of this species are left on the planet. An international team of scientists has now successfully created hybrid embryos from Southern White Rhino (SWR) eggs and NWR sperm using assisted reproduction techniques (ART). This is the first, ever reported, generation of blastocysts (a pre-implantation...
Spiders go ballooning on electric fields
The aerodynamic capabilities of spiders have intrigued scientists for hundreds of years. Charles Darwin himself mused over how hundreds of the creatures managed to alight on the Beagle on a calm day out at sea and later take-off from the ship with great speeds on windless day.
Scientists have attributed the flying behaviour of these wingless...