Blue Planet Biomes - World Biomes What is a Biome? A biome is a large geographical area of distinctive plant and animal groups, which are adapted to that particular environment. The climate and geography of a region determines what type of biome can exist in that region. Major biomes include deserts, forests, grasslands, tundra, and several types of aquatic environments. Each biome consists of many ecosystems whose communities have adapted to the small differences in climate and the environment inside the biome. All living things are closely related to their environment. The earth includes a huge variety of living things, from complex plants and animals to very simple, one-celled organisms.
Eye Evolution - Cumulative Evolution of Complex Structures - Science 8 - Childs Directions: The diagram at right shows the evolution of the eye. One of the criticisms about evolution is that complex structures (such as eyes) could not evolve randomly, as is the case with natural selection. However, CUMULATIVE EVOLUTION explains how natural selection of random variations within a species could produce complex structures. An eye does not just appear one generation in a species, it is a slow process of slightly better adaptations that over long periods leads to the development of the eye. Go to the website below to find out more about eye evolution! Evolution of the Eye Website: Course Blog Posting - Add Your Comments and Questions Here: Note: The authors of the website criticize an idea called "intelligent design".
Why Are Europeans White? The Puzzle: Northern Europeans are Uniquely Depigmented “White,” of course, is a a social designation. The question really is, “Why are northern Europeans depigmented?” Here is a map of human skin tone. The natives of northern Europe are oddly light-skinned. Most people know that it has something to do with sunlight, UV, latitude, and vitamin D. The closer you are to the equator, the darker your skin. It Has Something to do With Solar UV and Oceans UV rays produce vitamin D and reduce folate when they hit naked skin. Too much UV penetrating the skin (too pale-skinned under intense sunlight) increases Vitamin D but reduces folate. On the other hand, too little UV penetrating the skin (too dark-skinned under dim sunlight) increases folate but reduces vitamin D. And so, humans adapt very quickly to solar UV. But this explanation fails for Europe. Clearly, there once was a factor at work in Europe other than dim sunlight. Here is another map of skin tone. Skin, Hair, and Eyes: Neoteny
Boy finds 10,000-year-old arrowhead on New Jersey beach Noah Cordle, 10, found a 10,000-year-old Paleoindian arrow point on a New Jersey beach.Kelly-Jane Cotter/ Asbury Park Press BEACH HAVEN, N.J. – A boy playing on a New Jersey beach has unearthed a 10,000-year-old arrowhead possibly used by ancient Native Americans to spear fish or hunt mastodon. Noah Cordle, 10, and his family were vacationing on the Long Beach Island last week when he found it at the edge of the surf in the community of Beach Haven. It was sharp enough that it hurt as it hit his leg. He thought it was a crab until he picked up the object. The Springfield, Virginia family contacted the Archaeological Society of New Jersey to check it out. The president, Greg Lattanzi, who is also a curator at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton, tells the Asbury Park Press that the arrow point probably dates back 8,000 to 11,000 years. "I was basically blown away," he said. Only one other in the collection washed up on a beach. "Jasper is a yellow-brown stone," Lattanzi told the paper.
Quantum Consciousness Tony's Home | Clifford Math of Consciousness at the Edge of Chaos | | Superposition Separation | Structures | OrchOR | TimeScales - Table - Graph | | Cycles: Biology and Quantum | | Conscious Universe | Quantum Mind 2003 | QuanCon | Clifford Math of Consciousness The Discrete HyperDiamond Generalized Feynman Checkerboard and Continuous Manifolds are related by Quantum Superposition: Elements of a Discrete Clifford algebra correspond to Basis Elements of a Real Clifford algebra. Dimi Chakalov said: "... 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. My thoughts are: It looks to me as though "re-annealing" (in 2) = "collapse" (in 5 and 6). In the Many-Worlds picture of the Multiverse Macrospace, you don't have collapse, but what happens is that you cease to experience ALL AT ONCE many superposed possibilities and you begin to experience EACH possibility IN ITS OWN "world" with no (or very limited) connections among the different "worlds". Robert Neil Boyd has suggested that Consciousness could be modeled by Clifford algebras.
Y-Chromosomal Adam Lived 208,300 Years Ago, Says New Study According to new research reported in the European Journal of Human Genetics, our most recent common ancestor – the so-called Y-chromosomal Adam – lived on the Earth 208,300 years ago. Creation of Adam, detail. By Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1510. Dr Eran Elhaik from the University of Sheffield and his co-authors used conventional biological models to show that Y-chromosomal Adam is 8,300 years older than scientists originally believed. “We can say with some certainty that modern humans emerged in Africa a little over 200,000 years ago,” Dr Elhaik said. The findings contradict a recent study – published in the American Journal of Human Genetics in February 2013 – which had claimed the human Y chromosome originated in a different species through interbreeding which dates Adam to be twice as old. “In fact, their hypothesis creates a sort of space-time paradox whereby the most ancient individual belonging to Homo sapiens species has not yet been born. Eran Elhaik et al. 2014.
Before Civilization - Ancient Civilizations for Kids Early humans showed another major sign of intelligence about 35,000 years ago. Humans began to draw on the walls of caves—probably other places too, but it has been preserved in caves. Cave paintings often depict hunting scenes. This is some of the first artwork and also an early attempt at written communication. Development of Agriculture The most important development in human history is the development agriculture, which is another word for farming. Corn is a good example of domestication. Humans have lived in Africa longer than anywhere else, but many African societies adopted farming much later than other parts of the world. The soil near rivers is very fertile—or full of plant food and good for growing. Agriculture Brings Changes Farming had other effects on lifestyle and society. The society that farming created forced people to interact in new ways. The world was rapidly changing and people finally had time to settle down and think about the world around them. A New Way of Life
Eye Evolution Learn.Genetics visitors, We’re asking for your help. For over 20 years, the Learn.Genetics website has provided engaging, multimedia educational materials at no cost. Learn.Genetics is one of the most-used science websites. Tens of millions of visitors come to our site each year to find the science and health information they’re looking for. If Learn.Genetics is useful to you, please take a moment to donate – even a few dollars from each of our visitors would add up to a significant amount! Your support will help us keep Learn.Genetics free and available to everyone. Please help us keep Learn.Genetics going! Thank you, The Genetic Science Learning Center team – creators of Learn.Genetics Learn.Genetics visitors, We’re asking for your help. Learn.Genetics is one of the most-used science websites. If Learn.Genetics is useful to you, please take a moment to donate – even a few dollars from each of our visitors would add up to a significant amount! Please help us keep Learn.Genetics going!
Ancient Man Had Neanderthal Great-Great Grandfather A modern human who lived in what is now Romania between 37,000 and 42,000 years ago had at least one Neanderthal ancestor as little as four generations back—which is to say, a great-great-grandparent. Scientists have known for at least half a decade that living humans bear traces of Neanderthal blood—or more specifically, Neanderthal DNA. Just when and where our ancestors bred with their now-extinct cousins, however, has been tricky to pin down until now. A new study published Monday in the journal Nature has the highest percentage of Neanderthal DNA of any modern human ever studied. “I could hardly believe that we were lucky enough to hit upon an individual like this,” says study co-author Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. The specimen, known as Oase 1, consists only of a male jawbone, and from the moment it was discovered in 2002 its shape suggested that it might belong to a hybrid between Homo sapiens and Neanderthal.
Epigenetics: A Turning Point in Our Understanding of Heredity | Guest Blog In a study published in late 2011 in Nature, Stanford University geneticist Anne Brunet and colleagues described a series of experiments that caused nematodes raised under the same environmental conditions to experience dramatically different lifespans. Some individuals were exceptionally long-lived, and their descendants, through three generations, also enjoyed long lives. Clearly, the longevity advantage was inherited. This type of finding—an inherited difference that cannot be explained by variations in genes themselves—has become increasingly common, in part because scientists now know that genes are not the only authors of inheritance. Epigenetics and the state of chromatin In Brunet's lab, epigenetic inheritance is a big deal. Chromatin is a compact fiber of proteins and DNA that exists in either a condensed or a relaxed state. Modifications can also accumulate during an organism’s lifetime. Epigenetic inheritance of longevity in nematodes
Epigenomics Fact Sheet Cancers are caused by changes in the genome, the epigenome, or both. Changes in the epigenome can switch on or off genes involved in cell growth or the immune response. These changes can lead to uncontrolled growth, a hallmark of cancer, or to a failure of the immune system to destroy tumors. In a type of brain tumor called glioblastoma, doctors have had some success in treating patients with the drug temozolomide, which kills cancer cells by adding methyl groups to DNA. In some cases, methylation has a welcome secondary effect: it blocks a gene that counteracts temozolomide. Glioblastoma patients whose tumors have such methylated genes are far more likely to respond to temozolomide than those with unmethylated genes. Changes in the epigenome also can activate growth-promoting genes in stomach cancer, colon cancer and the most common type of kidney cancer.
Natural Selection Natural Selection The characteristics of birds result from evolutionary processes, the most important process being natural selection. It was Charles Darwin who first pointed out that just as stockmen shaped their herds by selecting which animals would be allowed to breed, so too nature shaped all organisms by "selecting" the progenitors of the next generation. Darwin's thinking had been influenced by the great economist Thomas Malthus, who emphasized the capacity of people and other organisms to multiply their numbers much more rapidly than their means of subsistence. Darwin realized, therefore, that most individuals born of any species could not have survived long enough to reproduce. He concluded that those that had been able to survive and reproduce had not been a random sample of those born, but rather variants especially suited to their environments. Natural selection provides a context in which to view the physical and behavioral characteristics of birds.