Evolution

In a quest to understand how life began on Earth, scientists have discovered that a blast of ultraviolet light may have been the spoon that stirred the simmering primordial soup. The research demonstrates a more commonplace scenario for creating RNA -- believed to be an early coding system for life.

And that opens a wider door for life's evolution not only on Earth, but possibly elsewhere in the solar system and beyond. Researchers at Georgia Tech and the University of Roma "La Sapienza" focused on the molecule formamide, the simplest structure containing the required four building blocks of life -- carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. Previous studies have already shown how heating formamide in a mineral stew creates most of the ingredients for ribonucleic acid, commonly known as RNA.

View: Full Article | Source: Discovery Channel

New research has boosted the so-called "thermal hypothesis" that argues humans first walked upright due to the heat.The Turkana Basin of Kenya would have been far hotter in the past than it is now and the first humans would have had to adapt to cope with the heat, standing upright as oppose to on all-fours would have helped to keep cool because the temperature is lower away from the ground and less oftheir bodies would have been exposed to the sun.

The first humans may have started walking upright because the place where they lived was so hot, new research suggests. Scientists discovered that the Turkana Basin of Kenya, long held as the cradle of human evolution, was even hotter millions of years ago than it is now. Daytime temperatures would have been well into the late 90s every single day.

View: Full article | Source: DailyMail

Archaeologists have found what they say is the earliest evidence of Neanderthals living in Britain. Two pieces of flint unearthed at motorway works in Dartford, Kent, have now been dated to 110,000 years ago. The finds push back the presence of Neanderthals in Britain by 40,000 years or more, said Dr Francis Wenban-Smith, from Southampton University. A majority of researchers believe Britain was uninhabited by humans at the time the flint tools were made.

An absence of archaeological evidence suggests people abandoned this land between 200,000 years ago (or 160,000 years ago, depending on who you ask) and 65,000 years ago. But one researcher, unconnected with the study, said he was not convinced by the evidence presented so far.

View: Full Article | Source: BBC News

The ancestors of modern squid may have existed half a billion years ago - a lot earlier than previously thought. In a new study, Canadian researchers identified a previously unclassifiable fossil that was long believed to belong perhaps to the shrimp family. They called it Nectocaris pteryx - a small soft-bodied cephalopod with two tentacles rather than the eight or 10 seen in today's octopuses. The new survey's results were presented in the journal Nature. The findings make the ancestors of modern squid and octopuses at least 30 million years older.

Evolutionary biologist Martin Smith, the main author of the study, told PA news agency that the findings bring cephalopods much closer to the first appearance of complex animals. "We go from very simple pre-Cambrian life-forms to something as complex as a cephalopod in the geological blink of an eye, which illustrates just how quickly evolution can produce complexity," said Mr Smith.

View: Full Article | Source: BBC News

Image Credit: Marianne Collins