"The insect world is full of species of parasitic wasps that spend their infancy eating other insects alive. And for reasons that scientists don’t fully understand, they have repeatedly adopted and tamed wild, disease-causing viruses and turned them into biological weapons. Half a dozen examples already are described, and new research hints at many more."
I'm going to catch us up on some interesting science for a couple of days. A break from the daily horror show.
"Survival of the nicest: have we got evolution the wrong way round?
How humans, animals and even single-celled organisms cooperate to survive suggests there’s more to life than just competition, argues a cheering study of evolutionary biology." #cooperation#evolution https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00999-5
I am looking for candidates for 2-years #postdoc position, working on my #ERC project, developing a new statistical method to infer the distribution of the effect sizes of QTL. More information here : https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/225408
Exciting opportunity to work in Paris, in the middle of the Jardin des Plantes, with a great (and humble) supervisor.
I am looking for candidates for 54-months (!) Lead resarch technician position, working on my #ERC project, developing haplotagging methods, managing data and helping with field work. More information here : https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/225940
Exciting opportunity to work in Paris, in the middle of the Jardin des Plantes, with a great (and humble) supervisor.
How Indonesia’s Toba Volcano Changed Human Evolution
The massive supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago has been blamed for nearly killing off our species. The emerging truth is much more interesting - by Gemma Tarlach April 29, 2024
"...Stone tools have been found both above and below layers of Toba ash deposited in northern India, the Arabian Peninsula, and elsewhere, showing that humans were present in those areas before and after the catastrophic eruption. They found ways to weather the actual event and any changes in climate that followed. And in March, after decades of research in a remote corner of Ethiopia, a multidisciplinary team determined that humans there survived shifts in climate likely caused by the distant eruption by changing their diet and, quite possibly, innovating a new hunting technique: archery..."
It's #FollowFriday: If you love #science and #STEM follow @animalculum !
He always has a fascinating mix of studies and articles that bring you back the big Aww!
“On the whole, large differences in exploratory behavior were observed between the cichlid species, and these differences were also confirmed under laboratory conditions [...] This puts the focus back on animal behavior as driving force behind key evolutionary processes"