Apparently our society is so advanced that we can tell who invented what just by looking at animals. The survival techniques of West African chimpanzees have revealed that the first human weapons may have been developed by women.
The use of spears and axes to hunt and kill is commonly thought to have been pioneered among humanity’s ancestors by males, but research has indicated weapons may have been a female invention that compensated for their lesser size and strength.
A germ that kills males has triggered a vicious cycle of increasing female promiscuity and male sexual exhaustion in a species of butterfly, scientists report. The male-killing bacteria known as Wolbachia are extremely widespread in insects, found in more than one-fifth of species. The germs can turn males to females and cause infected females to reproduce without males.
Scientists had assumed these bacteria would profoundly alter the natural mating patterns of their hosts, but only had scant evidence of what these changes would entail in the wild. Evolutionary biologist Sylvain Charlat at University College London and his colleagues investigated the common eggfly Hypolimnas bolina. This butterfly is found in locations ranging from Madagascar to Asia, and from Australia and to Easter Island.
A new spacecraft is being readied for another trip to Mars to excavate the planet’s icy dirt, seeking a sunlit habitat where life might have been in the distant past. It will mark the first time since the famed life-seeking Viking missions 30 years ago that NASA has sent a tool to dig beneath the planet’s surface.