Category Archives: Evolution
Tour campus museums on Super Science Saturday, Feb. 2
The day before Super Bowl Sunday, take an afternoon for some super science museums. UC Davis’s second annual Biodiversity Museum Day will take place Saturday, February 2, from 1 to 4 pm. The event is a special opportunity to go …
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“Mothers and Others” wins book awards
UC Davis Professor emerita of Anthropology Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has been awarded the J. I. Staley Prize from the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe for her book, Mothers and Others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding (Harvard University …
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BGI President Yang: “Let’s collaborate” on century of life science
Big numbers — of DNA base pairs sequenced, numbers of genomes completed, volumes of data collected and dollars invested — were in the air Nov. 9 when Dr. Huanming (Henry) Yang, president and cofounder of BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics …
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Yak genome shows high-altitude adaptations
The genome of the yak, a hairy bovine found on the high Tibetan plateau, has been sequenced by an international team led by Chinese scientists and including Harris Lewin, vice chancellor for research at UC Davis. The results were published …
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New Frog species found in exotic habitat…New York
It’s not every day that science adds a new vertebrate species, and you might think the likely place to find undiscovered animals would be a remote rainforest or island. But researchers from UC, Rutgers and the University of Alabama have …
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Did stinging evolve before seeing?
The human eye has sometimes been held up as a problem for evolutionary theory — how did such a complex structure evolve from simple parts? Evolutionary scientists, beginning with Charles Darwin, have pointed out that the eye could have evolved …
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Of mice, flies, rice and men
Wednesday’s symposium on innate immunity was a big success with a capacity crowd of over 400 attendees at the UC Davis Conference Center. The audience heard Nobel Prize winners Bruce Beutler of the University of Texas and Jules Hoffmann of …
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Dogs are from China, Cats are from Iraq
A new genetic study from the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine shows that Western dog breeds are descended from animals that originated in Southeast Asia, rather than in the Middle East or Europe as previously thought. An earlier study …
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Nobel Prize for innate immunity
The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Bruce Beutler of UCSF, Jules Hoffmann of CNRS, France, and Ralph Steinman of the Rockefeller University for work showing how the ancient, innate immune system is triggered and …
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The eyes have it: Dinosaurs hunted by night
UC Davis scientists can now determine whether a dinosaur was active by day, by night or around the clock — if they can find a fossil with well-preserved eyebones. The research by geology professor Ryosuke Motani and Lars Schmitz, a …
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