News
Moths strike out in evolutionary arms race with sophisticated wing design
24 November 2020
Ultra-thin, super-absorbent and extraordinarily designed to detract attention, the wings of moths could hold the key for developing technological solutions to survive in a noisy world.
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Moths strike out in evolutionary arms race with sophisticated wing design
24 November 2020
Ultra-thin, super-absorbent and extraordinarily designed to detract attention, the wings of moths could hold the key for developing technological solutions to survive in a noisy world.
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Dr Colin J Mapes, 1938-2020
18 November 2020
Dr Colin Mapes, former lecturer in Biological Sciences at Bristol, has died. Sir Brian Follett FRS and several colleagues offer a remembrance.
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Big babies, little mothers: tsetse flies show extreme mothering
5 November 2020
The tsetse fly is an exception to the almost universal law of nature that babies are born smaller than their mothers.
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Fossil poop shows fishy lunches from 200 million years ago
3 November 2020
A new study of coprolites, fossil poop, shows the detail of food webs in the ancient shallow seas around Bristol in south-west England. One hungry fish ate part of the head of another fish before snipping off the tail of a passing reptile.
- Patrick Kennedy awarded prestigious PhD thesis prizes 30 October 2020 Patrick Kennedy has won three awards for his PhD thesis. In addition to the University of Bristol prize for the best thesis in the Faculty of Life Sciences, he has won the John C. Marsden Medal from the Linnean Society and the Thomas Henry Huxley Award and Marsh Prize from the Zoological Society of London.
- Deep sea coral time machines reveal ancient CO2 burps 29 October 2020 The fossilised remains of ancient deep-sea corals may act as time machines providing new insights into the effect the ocean has on rising CO2 levels, according to new research carried out by the Universities of Bristol, St Andrews and Nanjing and published in Science Advances.
- Ground-breaking discovery finally proves rain really can move mountains 29 October 2020 A pioneering technique which captures precisely how mountains bend to the will of raindrops has helped to solve a long-standing scientific enigma.
- Ancient tiny teeth reveal first mammals lived more like reptiles 29 October 2020 Pioneering analysis of 200 million-year-old teeth belonging to the earliest mammals suggests they functioned like their cold-blooded counterparts - reptiles, leading less active but much longer lives.
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Giant lizards learnt to fly over millions of years
29 October 2020
Pterodactyls and related winged reptiles that lived alongside the dinosaurs steadily improved their ability to fly, becoming the deadly masters of the sky, over the course of millions of years.
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World’s greatest mass extinction triggered switch to warm-bloodedness
19 October 2020
Mammals and birds today are warm-blooded, and this is often taken as the reason for their great success.