#adaptation-ending

#adaptation-ending

The article tackles the mystery of why birds were the only dinosaurs to survive the asteroid impact 66 million years ago, which drastically altered evolution. This question has intrigued paleontologists for years.

When scientists applied a new model of human survivability that takes into account the body's ability to function and stay cool depending on age, they found all six events had seen non-survivable periods for older people who could not find shade.

During major floods, thousands of tiny fish convene at Luvilombo Falls in the upper Congo River Basin to undertake a peculiar vertical migration, described for the first time today in Scientific Reports.

Few transformations in the history of life have been as extreme as the embrace of the ocean by seagrass. Like whales and dolphins, modern seagrasses descend from land-dwelling ancestors.

"So whenever people think about hot weather, they always talk about the temperature," he says. "There's two issues with that. First of all, most people don't realise that the temperature is measured in the shade. So if you're in direct solar radiation, the amount of heat stress you're exposed to is much greater as it will stress your body out a lot more."

London is the only place in the UK where you can find scorpions, snakes, turtles, seals, peacocks, falcons all in one city and not London zoo. Step outside and you will encounter a patchwork of writhing, buzzing, bubbling urban microclimates. Sam Davenport, the director of nature recovery at the London Wildlife Trust, emphasises the sheer variation in habitats that you find in UK cities, which creates an amazing mosaic of wildlife.

Less than a year ago, United States company Colossal Biosciences announced it had "resurrected" the dire wolf, a megafauna-hunting wolf species that had been extinct for 10,000 years. Within two days of Colossal's announcement, the Interior Secretary of the US, Doug Burgum, used the idea of resurrection to justify weakening environmental protection laws: "pick your favourite species and call up Colossal". His reasoning appeared to confirm critics' fears about de-extinction technology. If we can bring any species back, why protect them to begin with?

Recently, two unexpected examples by a wild wolf and a domesticated cow named Veronika attracted global attention and once again opened the door for experts and others to weigh in on the question, "Are these really examples of tooling?" Many people are eager to know more about the nitty-gritty details of tooling, so I am thrilled that Dr. Benjamin Beck, an expert in this area, could answer a few questions about this fascinating behavior.

Before became the dominant lens through which we interpret human suffering-and before resilience became the preferred word for recovery- adaptation was one of the central concepts used to understand how human beings survive, change, prepare, and continue developing under pressure. In early psychology, psychiatry, ethology, and evolutionary biology, adaptation was not a moral term. It was descriptive, not prescriptive. It referred to the organism's capacity to reorganize itself-biologically, emotionally, cognitively, and socially-in response to changing conditions.

There's a concept in clinical psychology called stress inoculation. Developed by Donald Meichenbaum in the 1970s and refined over decades of trauma research, the idea is deceptively simple: controlled exposure to stressors literally rewires how the brain processes future threats. The amygdala - that ancient alarm system buried deep in the temporal lobe - learns to distinguish between 'this is dangerous' and 'this is familiar.'

Because we're homeotherms, we assume all mammals work the way we do. But in recent years, as improvements in technology allowed researchers to more easily track small animals and their metabolisms in the wild, we're starting to find a lot more weirdness.

When Storm Dennis hit the UK in 2020, a wall of dirty, frigid water from a tributary of the Taff threw Paul Thomas against the front of his house in the south Wales village of Ynysybwl. He managed to swim back into his home before the storm surge changed direction, almost carrying him out of the smashed-in front door. I was holding on to downpipes to stop myself being dragged out again.

The record-breaking arctic blast that hit Florida earlier this month may have sent humans scurrying for winter coats, but it sent wildlife scurrying, swimming and slithering for their lives. Some of those animals were native, some were invasive. Some survived. Thousands of others did not. The benchmark for cold snaps in Florida is the 2010 freeze, which killed manatees, crocodiles, iguanas, thousands of snook and goliath grouper, and caused 50% to 90% of invasive pythons to die in some areas.