Alex Honnold on his historic free solo of the Grade V big-wall route El Sendero Luminoso (5.12d) in El Potrero Chico, Mexico. Photo by Cedar Wright used at Rock & Ice Magazine, used here with special permission. Click image for details.
Evolution doesn't stop, nothing alive now or in the past was an inherent endpoint. So this shouldn't come as that
big of a surprise:
But the origin of this domestication remains stubbornly mysterious. Researchers analyzed the genomes of wolves from three likely sites of domestication (the Middle East, Asia and eastern Europe), and found that modern dogs were not more closely related to any of the three. In fact, it seems that the closest wolf ancestors of today's dogs may have gone extinct, leaving no wild descendants.
This is being widely reported in traditional media as "Dogs did not descend from wolves." Technically true, wolves are a modern species. But if you saw a member of the species dogs did descend from, calling it a wolf would probably be pretty damn descriptive.
"The dogs all form one group, and the wolves all form one group, and there's no wolf that these dogs are more closely related to of the three that we sampled," said study researcher John Novembre.
- What kind of Big Ideas might be ready for the junk heap in science? Cal-tech physicist Sean Carroll writes that falsifiability may be a candidate.
- You've heard of smart glasses, how about smart contacts?
- It's long, big, and goes real deep: it's also buried under tons of ice!
- No, really, it's spewing glowing diamond blue lava.
- Got this from a lady speaking at a high school science program:
She also outlined some exciting new medical product developments, including some made with a 3-D printer. They are now making replacement knees that perfectly match a patient, they are able to make covers that fit perfectly on a damaged skull, and even help people with missing body parts, such as an artificial hand that works by moving the wrist. Other research is being done to link implants with the brain.