Category Archives: Science

you smell better than you think

From The Scotsman:

New research shows people can follow trails across countryside like dogs, using the sense of smell alone. The study, published in Nature magazine, suggests humans are just out of practice at smelling, after people who repeatedly tracked smells across fields became faster and more accurate.

(With one story I got to use a great headline and link to The Scotsman.  It pretty much made my morning.)

Study Detects Recent Instance of Human Evolution

From the New York Times:

A surprisingly recent instance of human evolution has been detected among the peoples of East Africa. It is the ability to digest milk in adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago, a team of geneticists has found.

The finding is a striking example of a cultural practice — the raising of dairy cattle — feeding back into the human genome. It also seems to be one of the first instances of convergent human evolution to be documented at the genetic level. Convergent evolution refers to two or more populations acquiring the same trait independently.