Showing results for "The Animals" in Genetics

How is it that a baboon and a blob of slime mould instinctively know what to eat for optimal health, balancing their protein, fat and carb intake in perfect proportions? In new, groundbreaking research that is transforming our understanding of nutrition, animals from locusts to lions and yes, humans too, demonstrate the remarkable science behind appetite.

For over a century, opening the black box of embryonic development was the holy grail of biology. Evo Devo--Evolutionary Developmental Biology--is the new science that has finally cracked open the box. Within the pages of his rich and riveting book, Sean B. Carroll explains how we are discovering that complex life is ironically much simpler than anyone ever expected.

I’ve written a number of books on longevity and immortality. But I’ve only had some partial chapters on long-lived plants and animals. This is an important subject because all of this life is based on the same DNA code we have in our own bodies. If this life can live for hundreds or thousands of years, then this says that it is possible for humanity to live that long, also. Here I’ve researched and included lots of specimens of animal and plant life which represent the extremes of longevity for widely varying life.

While we joke that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, our gender differences can't compare to those of other animals. For instance: the male garden spider spontaneously dies after mating with a female more than fifty times his size. Female cichlids must guard their eggs and larvae--even from the hungry appetites of their own partners. And male blanket octopuses employ a copulatory arm longer than their own bodies to mate with females that outweigh them by four orders of magnitude. Why do these gender gulfs exist?