Latest Duke University Stories

A fossil that was celebrated last year as a possible "missing link" between humans and early primates is actually a forebearer of modern-day lemurs and lorises, according to two papers by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin, Duke University and the University of Chicago.In an article now available online in the Journal of Human Evolution, four scientists present evidence that the 47-million-year-old Darwinius masillae is not a haplorhine primate like humans, apes and...

Thinking flawed that all species react the same to the environmentIt's a paradox that's puzzled scientists for a half-century.Models clearly show that the coexistence of competing species depends on those species responding differently to the availability of resources. Then why do studies comparing competing tree species draw a blank?Competitors like black gums and red maples have coexisted for millennia in the shaded understories of eastern U.S. forests, yet species-level data offer scant...

If a tiger's feet were built the same way as a mongoose's feet, they'd have to be about the size of a hippo's feet to support the big cat's weight. But they're not.For decades, researchers have been looking at how different-sized legs and feet are put together across the four-legged animal kingdom, but until now they overlooked the "shoes," those soft pads on the bottom of the foot that bear the brunt of the animal's walking and running.New research from scientists in Taiwan and at...

Cultural views of evolution can have important ethical implications, says a Duke University expert on theological and biomedical ethics. Because the popular imagination filters science through cultural assumptions about race, cultural history should be an essential part of biomedical conversations.Amy Laura Hall, associate professor of Christian ethics at Duke University, argues that many popularized ideas about evolution assume that some human groups are more evolved than other human...

NEW YORK, Feb. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- To "tip-off" a new year, Jay Williams, current ESPN College Basketball Analyst and Duke Basketball Legend is holding a press conference announcing the re-launch of Rising Stars Youth Foundation -- an organization that helped develop several NCAA and NBA stars. The press conference will take place at Hudson Terrace (621 West 46th Street) in New York City, Monday, February 22nd at 5:00PM. Jay will announce how the foundation is evolving and provide...

New research suggests that the act of voluntarily sharing something with another may not be entirely exclusive to the human experience. A study published in the March 9th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, observed that bonobos"”a sister species of chimpanzees and, like chimps, our closest living relatives"”consistently chose to actively share their food with others."It has been suggested that only humans voluntarily share their food," says lead study author...

Any way you look at it -- by sheer weight, species diversity or population -- the hard-shelled, joint-legged creepy crawlies called arthropods dominate planet Earth. Because of their success and importance, scientists have been trying for decades to figure out the family relationships that link lobsters to millipedes and cockroaches to tarantulas and find which might have come first.In a scientific and technological tour de force that was nearly a decade in the making, a team of scientists...

In a novel study that used historical tape of a thrilling overtime basketball game between Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, brain researchers at Duke have found that fans remember the good things their team did much better than the bad.It's serious science, aimed at understanding the links between emotion and memory that might affect Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and how well people recall their personal histories.Struggling to find a way to measure a person's brain...

Sharing is a behavior on which day care workers and kindergarten teachers tend to offer young humans a lot of coaching. But for our ape cousins the bonobos, sharing just comes naturally.In fact, according to a pair of papers in the latest Current Biology, it looks like bonobos never seem to learn how not to share. Chimpanzees, by contrast, are notorious for hogging food to themselves, by physical aggression if necessary. While chimps will share as youngsters, they grow out of it.In several...

ST. LOUIS and KANNAPOLIS, N.C., Jan. 28, 2010 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Monsanto Company (NYSE: MON) plans to become a part of the North Carolina Research Campus (NCRC), a one-of-a-kind facility under development in Kannapolis, North Carolina, and a strategic alliance with the David H. Murdock Research Institute (DHMRI). Envisioned and founded by David H. Murdock, owner of Castle & Cooke Inc., and majority owner of Dole Foods Company, Inc., the NCRC brings together academia and...