Tag: Humans

ScienceDaily (Aug. 5, 2011) The farther that human populations live from the equator, the bigger their brains, according to a new study by Oxford University.
But it turns out that this is not because they are smarter, but because they need bigger vision areas in the brain to cope with the low light levels experienced at high latitudes.

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Over the next decade, the United States... Germany... England... Japan... India... China... Russia... and even a few private companies... have plans to send rockets to explore the moon.
They will map the lunar surface... search for clues to its origins... and find out what's there that humans can use to survive.

ScienceDaily (Mar. 9, 2010) A team of scientists has discovered that the drastic decline in Arctic musk ox populations that began roughly 12,000 years ago was due to a warming climate rather than to human hunting.

"This is the first study to use ancient musk ox DNA collected from across the animal's former geographic range to test for human impacts on musk ox populations," said Beth Shapiro, the Shaffer Career Development assistant professor of biology at Penn State University and one of the team's leaders. "We found that, although human and musk ox populations overlapped in many regions across the globe, humans probably were not responsible for the decline and eventual extinction of musk oxen across much of their former range."

ScienceDaily (Dec. 9, 2009) Humans have the same receptors for detecting odors related to sex as do other primates. But each species uses them in different ways, stemming from the way the genes for these receptors have evolved over time, according to Duke University researchers.

Varying sensitivity to these sex-steroid odors may play a role in mate selection -- and perhaps prevent cross-species couplings, the researchers speculate.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 3, 2009) In spite of their genetic similarity to humans, chimpanzees and great apes have maximum lifespans that rarely exceed 50 years. The difference, explains USC Davis School of Gerontology Professor Caleb Finch, is that as humans evolved genes that enabled them to better adjust to levels of infection and inflammation and to the high cholesterol levels of their meat rich diets.