An international team of scientists has sequenced the coffee genome and has found that the caffeine in coffee plants evolved separately to the caffeine in tea plants.

Source: http://www.nature.com/nature/archive/category.html?code=archive_news&year=2014 ...

Here's how 9,000 years of selective breeding has changed corn from a wild grass - that required a hammer to peel - to the juicy yellow ears of deliciousness we know today.

Most foods today are fortified with essential oils like omega-3 fatty acids. Naturally, these oils are found in fish, and are known to benefit many parts of the body, including the eyes, brain, heart, and joints. So, are these so-called beneficial oils important for people who lack the DNA profile needed to metabolise them?

It turns out that the extra omega-3 might not do much good at all. According to a study published in Science, Inuit people living in Greenland whose traditional diet of fish and marine mammals have the right enzymes in their bodies needed to metabolise these foods that are very high fat content.

The researchers reported that their DNA that was most different was on chromosome 11, specifically among genes that control the ...

Even though being afraid of the dark sounds childish, our fear of the dark is an evolutionary trait that we picked up to survive real-life predators stalking the night. Researchers have hypothesised that this innate fear stems from a point of human history when we were nowhere near the top predators we are today. Humans only really became super predators with the advent of technology, which wasn’t that long ago.

Before technology, our ancestors were constantly on the look-out for predators that wanted nothing more than to chow down on human sandwiches. To make that even scarier, most of these predators hunted at night - a time of day when we are especially vulnerable to attack because of our relatively poor eyesight.  

This means that it was ...

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Despite slang terms that imply otherwise, the human penis contains no bones. The same cannot be said for many of our closest evolutionary relatives: Chimpanzees and bonobos both have penis bones (a macaque one is pictured, left), also known as bacula.

To find out why some primates have the feature whereas others don’t, researchers traced the bone’s evolutionary history through time. The baculum first evolved between 145 million and 95 million years ago, as reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. That means it was present in the most recent common ancestor of all primates and carnivores. Why some descendants, like humans, lost their bacula appears to be due to differences in mating practices: In primates, the presence of a penis ...