How does a tabby cat earn its stripes? With the right DNA. Scientists say they’ve found the gene that sets the common tabby pattern — stripes or blotches. It’s one of several genes that collaborate to create the distinctive design of a cat’s coat, and it’s the first of the pattern genes to be identified….
Scientists can’t travel deep space the way Columbus sailed and charted the New World or Lewis and Clark mapped the west. But, researchers at Case Western Reserve University and two partnering institutions have found a possible way to map the spread and structure of the universe, guided by the light of quasars. The technique, combined…
Scientists have discovered the strongest evidence yet for a 13.2-billion-year old galaxy, a finding that provides a key piece of information about the universe’s early childhood. “This is the most distant (galaxy) identified with high confidence,” astronomer Wei Zheng, with Johns Hopkins University, told Discovery News. “If our current universe is a man of 70…
Global climate revenues fell 5 percent in 2011 to $539 billion from an all-time high the previous year, mainly dragged down by the weak performance of low-carbon energy companies hit by the global economic slowdown, a report by HSBC said. Climate revenues were unlikely to exceed 2010’s all-time high of $567 billion over the next…
Map reveals the activity of genes across the entire brain to help shed light on neurological and psychiatric conditions
A warming trend has contributed to a sharp rise in the number and size of wildfires on forest lands in the U.S. West, where big burns are likely to become the norm, according to a report released by a climate research group. The average annual number of fires that cover more than 1,000 acres has…
By studying how birds master songs used in courtship, scientists have found that regions of the brain involved in planning and controlling complex vocal sequences may also be necessary for memorizing sounds that serve as models for vocal imitation. In a paper appearing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, researchers at Duke and Harvard universities observed…
Ocean temperatures off the northeast United States have reached a record high. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the average sea surface temperature for the Northeast continental shelf ecosystem, from North Carolina to Maine, was a little over 50.5 degrees for the first half of 2012. The previous record high for the first…
With Arctic ice melting at record pace, the world’s superpowers are increasingly jockeying for political influence and economic position in outposts previously regarded as barren wastelands. At stake are the Arctic’s abundant supplies of oil, gas and minerals that are, thanks to climate change, becoming newly accessible along with increasingly navigable polar shipping shortcuts. This…
A new study, published online in Biology Letters, has utilized a massive molecular dataset to reconstruct the evolutionary history of lizards and snakes. The results reveal a surprising finding about the evolution of snakes: that most snakes we see living on the surface today arose from ancestors that lived underground. The study was based on…