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The Games Genes Play: Algorithm Helps Explain Sex in Evolution

What do you get when you mix theorists in computer science with evolutionary biologists? You get an algorithm to explain sex. It turns out that 155 years after Charles Darwin first published “On the Origin of Species,” vexing questions remain about key aspects of evolution, such as how sexual recombination and natural selection produced the teeming diversity of life that…

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UH Research Focuses on How Food Marketing Creates a False Sense of Health

Health-related buzzwords, such as “antioxidant,” “gluten-free” and “whole grain,” lull consumers into thinking packaged food products labeled with those words are healthier than they actually are, according to a new research study conducted by scholars at the University of Houston (UH). That “false sense of health,” as well as a failure to understand the information presented in nutrition facts panels…

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Chimpanzees Spontaneously Initiate and Maintain Cooperative Behavior

Without any pre-training or restrictions in partner choice among chimpanzees, researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, found for the first time that chimpanzees housed in a socially complex, contained setting spontaneously cooperate with multiple partners of their choosing. This finding, which addresses long-standing doubt about the level of cooperation chimpanzees are able to spontaneously achieve or…

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From Contemporary Syntax to Human Language’s Deep Origins

On the island of Java, in Indonesia, the silvery gibbon, an endangered primate, lives in the rainforests. In a behavior that’s unusual for a primate, the silvery gibbon sings: It can vocalize long, complicated songs, using 14 different note types, that signal territory and send messages to potential mates and family. Far from being a mere curiosity, the silvery gibbon…

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Genes in the Cloud: Google Steps Into Autism Research

Google Inc. and Autism Speaks, a major autism research foundation, plan to announce on Tuesday a deal in which the Internet giant will house the sequencing of 10,000 complete genomes and other clinical data of children with autism and their siblings and parents. The hope of those involved is to accelerate research on the developmental disorder. Studying genes has been…

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Microbes May Drive Evolution of New Animal Species

A little over a year ago, Bordenstein, a biologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and his then-graduate student, Robert Brucker, mated two incompatible species of wasp in the lab, creating a hardy hybrid that lived when most others died. Normally, when members of two related species of parasitic wasps in the genus Nasonia, N. giraulti and N. longicornis, mate…

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