26th Jun 2008 : A couple of weeks ago we reported on the work of Richard Lenski, who has spent much of the last 20 years maintaining cultures of E. coli to see how they evolve. His paper describes how one of his populations evolved the ability to metabolise citrate, something E. coli cannot do by definition.

18th Jun 2008 : Leafing through the mail at his home outside London one June day 150 years ago, Charles Darwin came across an envelope sent from an island in what is now part of Indonesia. The writer was a young acquaintance, Alfred Russel Wallace, who eked out a living as a biological collector, sending butterflies, bird skins and other specimens back to England. This time, Wallace had sent along a 20-page manuscript, requesting that Darwin show it to other members of the British scientific community.

1st Jun 2008 :

29th May 2008 : ScienceDaily (May 29, 2008) — Researchers at The University of Nottingham have taken some important first steps to creating a synthetic copycat of a living cell, a leading science journal reports.

Dr Cameron Alexander and PhD student George Pasparakis in the University's School of Pharmacy have used polymers — long-chain molecules — to construct capsule-like structures that have properties mimicking the surfaces of a real cell.

22nd May 2008 : When a historic cleanup helped clear the waters of a polluted lake near Seattle, a population of tiny, spiny fish called sticklebacks may have "evolved in reverse" to survive.

28th Apr 2008 : A male orangutan, clinging precariously to overhanging branches, flails the water with a pole, trying desperately to spear a passing fish.

It is the first time one has been seen using a tool to hunt.

The extraordinary image, a world exclusive, was taken in Borneo on the island of Kaja, where apes are rehabilitated into the wild after being rescued from zoos, private homes or even butchers' shops.

21st Apr 2008 :
PHILADELPHIA - A new exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania about human evolution gives a new meaning to the expression "nobody's perfect."

20th Apr 2008 :
ScienceDaily (Apr. 18, 2008) — In 1971, biologists moved five adult pairs of Italian wall lizards from their home island of Pod Kopiste, in the South Adriatic Sea, to the neighboring island of Pod Mrcaru. Now, an international team of researchers has shown that introducing these small, green-backed lizards, Podarcis sicula, to a new environment caused them to undergo rapid and large-scale evolutionary changes.

25th Mar 2008 :

2nd Mar 2008 : When David Attenborough started out in TV 54 years ago, he came up with an idea for a series that today would get him thrown out of the BBC and lynched by animal activists. "We decided," he recalled recently, "we would go out into the wild to capture animals and bring them back to London Zoo."

13th Feb 2008 : The earliest fossil bat yet found suggests that the species' trademark echolocation had yet to evolve.

12th Feb 2008 : Exactly one year shy of Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, scientists are looking ahead to the anniversary to call for renewed understanding of the scientist's powerful impact on Western civilization.

11th Feb 2008 : The project to map the human genome would have delighted and baffled Darwin, says Laurence D. Hurst, but 150 years on and we have grasped only 2% of its immense complexities

8th Feb 2008 : Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species changed the world. Here Richard Dawkins introduces a 34-page celebration of the book and its author, available FREE with tomorrow's edition of the Guardian

23rd Jan 2008 : 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.

25th May 2007 : Endangered species.

25th May 2007 : WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Primitive fish already may have possessed the genetic wiring needed to grow hands and feet well before the appearance of the first animals with limbs roughly 365 million years ago, scientists said on Wednesday.

23rd May 2007 : It was the 'virgin birth' that baffled scientists for years. But now the mystery of a hammerhead shark born at a zoo where there were no male sharks has been solved – it seems females of the species can reproduce without having sex.

21st May 2007 : Most of us feel a rush of righteous certainty in the face of a moral challenge, an intuitive sense of right or wrong hard to ignore yet difficult to articulate.

18th May 2007 : The origin of religion is in our heads, explains developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert. First we figured out how to make tools, then created a supernatural being.

16th May 2007 : Welcome to the Darwin Correspondence Project's new web site. The main feature of the site is an Online Database with the complete, searchable, texts of around 5,000 letters written by and to Charles Darwin up to the year 1865. This includes all the surviving letters from the Beagle voyage - online for the first time - and all the letters from the years around the publication of Origin of species in 1859.

15th May 2007 : State Darwin museum.

14th May 2007 : The evolutionary origins of complex organs, which in their current state of assembly feature many distinct components that apparently have no function in isolation, have long been debated.

12th May 2007 : Excerpts from Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors / A Search For Who We Are by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan

12th May 2007 : As E.O. Wilson accepts his 2007 TED Prize, he makes a plea on behalf of his constituents, the insects and small creatures, to learn more about our biosphere.

10th May 2007 : The Encyclopedia of Life.

10th May 2007 : Spurred by fears that thousands of animals, plants, and microbes will disappear from the planet before scientists can properly study them, a consortium of world-famous research institutions and funding foundations tomorrow will launch an effort to compile an enormous, computer-based "Encyclopedia of Life" to catalog every species known or found.

9th May 2007 : The human and chimpanzee genomes vary by just 1.2 percent, yet there is a considerable difference in the mental and linguistic capabilities between the two species.

4th May 2007 : Researchers in the US say they have firm evidence that apes communicate using gestures - shedding light on the development of human language.

4th May 2007 : Human spoken language may have evolved from a currency of hand and arm gestures, not simply through improvements in the basic vocalisations made by primates.

19th Apr 2007 : What makes some people neurotic or schizophrenic or right-handed or fearless? Are these behavioural differences caused by literal differences in how individuals' brains are wired?

16th Apr 2007 : Something old is now something new, thanks to Lamar University researcher Jim Westgate and colleagues. The scientists' research has led to the discovery of a new genus and species of primate, one long vanished from the earth but preserved in the fossil record.

11th Apr 2007 : The aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum depends on a bacterial symbiont, Buchnera aphidicola, for amino acids it can't get from plants. The aphid, in turn, provides the bacterium with energy and carbon as well as shelter inside specialized cells.

10th Apr 2007 : The acclaimed children's book author also was an ahead-of-her-time botanist.

17th Mar 2007 : Chimpanzees in Senegal have been observed making and using wooden spears to hunt other primates, according to a study in the journal Current Biology.

17th Feb 2007 :

17th Feb 2007 : A distinctive, repeating sequence of DNA found in people living at the eastern edge of Russia is also widespread among Native Americans, according to a new study.

17th Feb 2007 : "Regressive evolution," or the reduction of traits over time, is the result of either natural selection or genetic drift, according to a study on cavefish by researchers at New York University's Department of Biology, the University of California at Berkeley's Department of Integrative Biology, and the Harvard Medical School.

17th Feb 2007 : When man made his way out of Africa some 60,000 years ago to populate the world, he was not alone: He was accompanied by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, which causes gastritis in many people today.

29th Jan 2007 : To animals unfortunate enough to fall in, it was a death trap. To palaeontologists, it was a sensational discovery. Now the first detailed analysis of a spectacular cache of fossilised prehistoric "marsupial lions", giant wombats and kangaroos, owls and parrots discovered in a cave in Australia suggests that humans killed off the continent's megafauna.

22nd Jan 2007 : Just under half of Britons accept the theory of evolution as the best description for the development of life, according to an opinion poll.