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2 September 1999 | ScienceNOW

A Paternity Case for Wine Lovers

by Michael Hagmann

In vino veritas--plenty of secrets have tumbled from lips loosened by wine. Now, wine grapes themselves are spilling some secrets. Scientists have used DNA fingerprinting to decipher the pedigree of...

1 September 1999 | ScienceNOW

Symmetrical Crabs Come Out on Top

by Gretchen Vogel

Winners of World Wrestling Federation matches win cash prizes and the admiration of millions of fans. In the undersea world of crabs, the stakes are almost as high: Winners in...

20 August 1999 | ScienceNOW

Drought Drove Mexican Bird Species Apart

by Bernice Wuethrich

Researchers have found new proof for the theory that natural barriers, such as mountain ranges or dry areas, can cause the birth of new animal and plant species. In a...

4 August 1999 | ScienceNOW

The Oldest Flower

by Kathryn S. Brown

ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI--Pamela Soltis calls it botany's answer to the human genome project: a 5-year effort to compile data on the genes and traits of green plants into a vast...

28 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Glowing Sperm Sheds Light on Sex Wars

by Dana Mackenzie

Female fruit flies have a busy sex life. They mate once every couple of days, and store male sperm in their reproductive tract for up to a week. For males,...

15 July 1999 | ScienceNOW

Shocking Messages of Love

by Dana Mackenzie

For fish living in the murky waters of the Amazon basin, it might seem hard to find a mate. But several species of knife fish have come up with an...

29 June 1999 | ScienceNOW

Pint-Sized DNA Champ

by Elizabeth Pennisi

MADISON, WISCONSIN--Larger bodies may come with larger brains, but size means little when it comes to how much DNA an organism can pack in each cell. Researchers have discovered the...

8 June 1999 | ScienceNOW

Snails Set New Speed Record

by Daniel Radov

Snails are not known for being fleet of foot, but they may hold at least one speed record. A report in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows...

7 June 1999 | ScienceNOW

Evaluating Evolution

by Science News Staff

Today is the birthday of Otto Schindewolf, a German paleontologist born in 1896 who, after examining the fossil record, raised fundamental questions about the theory of evolution. After studying coral...

2 June 1999 | ScienceNOW

Atlantis of the Iguanas

by Douglas Palmer

Submarine volcanoes in the eastern Pacific were once sun-drenched islands that could have been home to iguanas and other creatures now found only on the Galápagos Islands. The discovery of...

18 May 1999 | ScienceNOW

Nobel Biochemist to Head Alien Biology Institute

by David Malakoff

A new NASA institute dedicated to studying how life might evolve elsewhere in the universe has finally found a leader. Space agency chief Daniel Goldin today named Nobel Prize-winning biochemist...

14 May 1999 | ScienceNOW

Building Blocks From the Primordial Soup

by Science News Staff

Forty-six years ago tomorrow, American chemist Stanley Miller gave a jolt to the debate on the origins of life with the publication in Science of his famous paper, "A Production...

3 May 1999 | ScienceNOW

Optimistic Evolutionist

by Science News Staff

Today is the birthday of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French paleontologist and philosopher born in 1881. He is known for his provocative writings asserting that humankind is evolving, mentally...

22 April 1999 | ScienceNOW

A New Human Ancestor?

by Elizabeth Culotta

Scientists have unearthed fossils of a small-brained hominid that may be a missing link in the evolutionary tree leading to humans. The find--a 2.5-million-year-old skull--is reported in tomorrow's Science, together...

31 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Survival of the Cheaters

by Dana Mackenzie

In evolution, it's often said that only the strong survive. But among viruses, biologists have found, natural selection sometimes favors the simply devious. This happens, they report in tomorrow's issue...

19 March 1999 | ScienceNOW

Flatworm Drifts to Bottom of Animal Tree

by Elizabeth Pennisi

DNA studies have caused a tiny marine flatworm to take a large leap down the tree of life. In today's Science, biologists report that the worms, called acoels, may be...

24 February 1999 | ScienceNOW

Singing of Health

by Dana Mackenzie

For some female birds, the best mate is one with a big vocabulary. At first blush this may seem like an odd way to pick a partner. After all, a...

16 February 1999 | ScienceNOW

Darwin's Disciple

by Science News Staff

Today is the birthday of Ernst Haeckel, a German zoologist and evolutionist born in 1834 who was a proponent and popularizer of Darwinian evolution. Haeckel studied the one-celled protozoan group...

12 February 1999 | ScienceNOW

Evolution's Revolution

by Science News Staff

Charles Robert Darwin, the father of evolution and modern genetics, was born on this day in 1809. In 1831, Darwin left for an epic 5-year voyage on the HMS Beagle...

12 February 1999 | ScienceNOW

Turtles Leap Up the Family Tree

by Kevin Boyd

You'd never expect a turtle to jump from one branch to another, but a paper in today's Science has them leaping to a new section of the reptile evolutionary tree....

28 January 1999 | ScienceNOW

Is the Human Genome Going Downhill?

by Menno Schilthuizen

For millions of years, our genomes have been collecting mutations at an alarming rate, researchers write in today's issue of Nature. That begs an intriguing riddle: If our DNA is...

14 January 1999 | ScienceNOW

Manakins: Deformed in the Name of Love

by Elizabeth Pennisi

DENVER--For the club-winged manakin, love knows few bounds. In its quest to secure an attractive partner, this small, stocky bird has evolved bigger wing muscles and heavier bones that likely...

13 January 1999 | ScienceNOW

Promiscuity Pays for Bumblebees

by Menno Schilthuizen

Planning to tell your children about the birds and the bees? Think twice. Queen bees are among the most wanton of animals, mating with up to 20 males on their...

7 January 1999 | ScienceNOW

Female Flies Decide Sperm Wars

by Menno Schilthuizen

Love may seem like war sometimes, but within the reproductive tract of female fruit flies, a true battle rages: Sperm from different male flies compete head-to-head for a chance to...

10 December 1998 | ScienceNOW

Traces of Evolution in Roach Bowels

by Gretchen Vogel

Cockroach guts may not sound like a promising hunting ground for clues to the origins of complex cells. But by plumbing the lower digestive tracts of the household pest, scientists...

30 November 1998 | ScienceNOW

DNA Suggests Cultural Traits Affect Whale Evolution

by Gretchen Vogel

In some species of whales, behaviors learned within families may be altering the course of genetic evolution. In the current Science, Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia,...

23 November 1998 | ScienceNOW

Queen-of-the-Hill Gene?

by David Kestenbaum

Ants are social animals (try sharing your home with 100,000 in-laws) that live by a complex social code. Many house rules were thought to be flexible: When food is scarce,...

30 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Elephant-Nosed Fish Plays the Electric Organ

by David Kestenbaum

Most animals rely on two eyes for accurate depth perception. Not the African elephant-nosed fish, which uses electrical pulses to navigate at night. Scientists report in this week's Nature that...

22 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Flying Aces of the Carboniferous

by Gretchen Vogel

To catch prey like mosquitoes and houseflies, dragonflies zoom and hover with extremely efficient, highly responsive wings--a feature many aerospace engineers would like to imitate. But nature had quite a...

30 September 1998 | ScienceNOW

Death in the Soft Jaws of a Stingray

by Meher Antia

Scientists have discovered how stingrays can enjoy their hard-shelled meals of snails and mussels despite the fact that their mouths are made of mushy cartilage: The stingray jaws, it turns...

23 September 1998 | ScienceNOW

Ingredient for Life Bubbled From Ocean

by Robert F. Service

Deep-sea hydrothermal vents give rise to some of the most bizarre forms of life on the planet, such as blind albino crabs. Now a study in tomorrow's issue of Nature...

31 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Astronomer Puts Better Odds on ETs

by Govert Schilling

Watch too many episodes of Star Trek and you might think that every solar system hosts some sort of talkative life-form. But a standard argument holds that despite the high...

19 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Diverse Immunity Traced to Rogue Genes

by Elizabeth Pennisi

A small piece of parasitic DNA that appears to have invaded the ancestral vertebrate genome some 450 million years ago may be the key to the incredible diversity of the...

18 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Bugs Snuggled Up Tight With Clams

by Dana Mackenzie

Despite scalding-hot water and poisonous hydrogen sulfide, deep-sea clams prosper along fissures in the sea bottom. But they can't do it alone: The clams survive because symbiotic bacteria inside their...

17 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Miocene Survivors: Armed to the Teeth?

by Jocelyn Kaiser

BALTIMORE--Ten million years ago, camels, rhinos, and as many as 20 different species of horses roamed North America. Most of these grazers died out about 6 million years ago, probably...

12 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Liverworts: The Original Landed Gentry

by Christie Aschwanden

Medieval herbalists named liverworts after the plant's liver-shaped lobes, whose extracts they believed could cure jaundice and other liver problems. Although the liverwort can't claim fame as a wonder drug...

11 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

A Volcanic Spark for Early Life

by Science News Staff

Flashes of lightning in volcanic ash clouds may have helped set the stage for life on Earth. Volcanic plumes were ideal crucibles for sparking stable nitrogen to form reactive compounds...

5 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

The Selfish Genes of Fire Ant Assassins

by Science News Staff

The idea of selfish genes, which stick around even if they do no obvious good for the individual carrying them, has some new evidence to back it up. A particularly...

4 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Life Breathed Into Deep-Sea Evolution

by Science News Staff

The best spot for evolving radically new marine creatures has seemed to be in shallow waters, where storms and fierce battles for resources wipe out the competition. Now two researchers...

30 July 1998 | ScienceNOW

Bones Boost Whale-Hippo Link

by Science News Staff

HAYAMA, JAPAN--A whale may be just an overgrown hippopotamus with an unusual lifestyle. A new analysis of early whale fossils reported here last week at the International Symposium on the...

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