Andrew Knoll and a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Carnegie Institution for Science, used a metric they termed "swing factor" to determine the ecological impact from the change in the number of animals within each palaeo-community in a given time-frame. The study, published in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesshowed that...
A new study by Martin Nowak examines how strategies can foster or destroy cooperation. “If you consider all strategies of direct reciprocity, a very small subset of them are either partners or rivals, but evolution always leads to one or the other,” says Nowak. The study in Nature Human Behaviorfinds that across repeated interactions, the environment that individuals find themselves in...
A long-running and fiercely debated question among scientists "Did spiders evolve to spin the orb web only once? Or multiple times?" may have an answer in a new study in Current Biology, led by a team of researchers including Gonzalo Giribet and postdoctoral fellow, Rosa Fernández. The research team compared approximately 2,500 genes from 159...
Peter Girguis and Sunita Shah Walter, University of Delaware (former Postdoc in Girguis lab), led a research team that has shown underground aquifers near the undersea Mid-Atlantic Ridge act like natural biological reactors, pulling in cold, oxygenated seawater, and allowing microbes to consume more refractory carbon than scientists believed. The study's results published in...
During a fieldtrip to Panama last summer, PhD student Danny Haelewaters (Pfister Lab) worked with a team of six researchers -- including PhD student Jasmin Camacho (Hoekstra Lab) -- to capture bats using mistnets for seven subsequent nights in a cloud-forested reserve in Darien, Panama. The team captured 227 bats representing 17 species to study the bat's parasitic associations. Their findings, published in...
