ScienceDaily: Fossils & Ruins News

Tetrahymena, a tiny single celled-organism, turns out to be hiding a surprising secret: it's doing respiration -- using oxygen to generate cellular energy -- differently from other organisms such as plants, animals or yeasts. The discovery highlights the power of new techniques in structural biology and reveals gaps in our knowledge of a major branch of the tree of life.

For a long time, ecologists assumed tree rings to be absent in tropical trees because of a lack of temperature and rain fluctuations in the trees' environment. But in recent decades, the formation of growth rings has been proven for hundreds of tropical tree species, which are sensitive to drought and usually experience at least a month or two of slightly reduced rainfall every year.

Dark patches of open sea that appear in the ice-choked water around Helheim Glacier may reveal new clues about how a rapidly changing Greenland glacier loses ice, according to scientists.

Neandertal populations in the Iberian Peninsula were experiencing local extinction and replacement even before Homo sapiens arrived, according to a new study.

You can't see it, but different substances in the petals of flowers create a 'bulls-eye' for pollinating insects, according to a scientist whose research sheds light on chemical changes in flowers which helps them respond to environmental changes, including climate change, that might threaten their survival.

Researchers have discovered argon trapped in air-hydrate crystals in ice cores, which can be used to reconstruct past temperature changes and climate shifts.