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Fruit fly larvae can taste ribonucleosides, the building blocks of gene transcripts, according to a new study publishing on August 7 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Hubert Amrein and Dushyant Mishra of Texas A&M Health Science Center and their colleagues. Moreover, the ability to detect ribonucleosides in the environment helps promote the rapid...

Humans have been capturing wild Asian elephants for more than 3,000 years, and this still continues today despite the fact that the populations are declining. An international team of researchers has now analysed records of timber elephants in Myanmar to understand the effects of capture. The study shows that even years after their capture, wild-caught...

The human genome is riddled with endogenous retroviruses -- little pieces of degraded and generally harmless retrovirus DNA passed down through the generations, along with our own genetic information. Because most endogenous retroviruses have been part of our DNA for millions of years, scientists can't explain how they went from their virulent, disease-causing forms to...

For nearly 60 years, the red fox has been teaching scientists about animal behavior. In a long-term experiment, foxes at the Russian Institute of Cytology and Genetics have been selected for tameness or aggression, recreating the process of domestication from wolves to modern dogs in real time. Today, with the first-ever publication of the fox...