By Victoria Gill
An Amazonian ant has dispensed with sex and developed into an all-female species, researchers have found.
The ants reproduce via cloning – the queen ants copy themselves to produce genetically identical daughters.
Egg stem cells could revolutionise fertility treatment (via New Scientist)
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 | No Comments
18:00 12 April 2009 by Linda Geddes
The dogma that women are born with a finite number of eggs may soon be overturned. Stem cells have been discovered in the ovaries of adult mice that seem to give rise to new eggs and healthy offspring.
If these findings are confirmed, it could revolutionise female reproduction – opening the door for women to put off child-rearing almost indefinitely, and providing a new source of eggs for women who have been rendered infertile.
From Studying Chimps, a Theory on Cooking (via NYTimes)
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 | No Comments
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
Richard Wrangham, a primatologist and anthropologist, has spent four decades observing wild chimpanzees in Africa to see what their behavior might tell us about prehistoric humans. Dr. Wrangham, 60, was born in Britain and since 1989 has been at Harvard, where he is a professor of biological anthropology. He is about to publish another book, “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.” He was interviewed over a vegetarian lunch at last winter’s American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago and again later by telephone. An edited version of the two conversations follows.
Q. In your new book, you suggest that cooking was what facilitated our evolution from ape to human. Until now scientists have theorized that tool making and meat eating set the conditions for the ascent of man. Why do you argue that cooking was the main factor?
A. All that you mention were drivers of the evolution of our species. However, our large brain and the shape of our bodies are the product of a rich diet that was only available to us after we began cooking our foods. It was cooking that provided our bodies with more energy than we’d previously obtained as foraging animals eating raw food.
