To understand the significance of the so-called Monkey Trial, one must try to imagine the America of 1925; specifically, the southern state of Tennessee.

Under pressure by a coalition of strict Christians, Tennessee became the first state in the United States to pass a law the Butler Act that deemed it illegal to "teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animal."

The act alarmed many in the legal community, including the recently formed American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which persuaded John Scopes, a 24-year-old high school science teacher and football coach from Illinois, to test the constitutionality of the law in what became known as The Monkey Trial.

The trial also attracted intense media attention, including live radio broadcasts of the trial for the first time in history, according to an award-winning documentary by PBS's American Experience on the trial.

Attorney Clarence Darrow represented Scopes; William Jennings Bryan, a Democratic conservative, represented both Tennessee and the fundamentalists who were deeply opposed to Charles Darwin's theory.

"I knew, sooner or later, that someone would have to stand up to the stifling of freedom that the anti-evolution act represented," Scopes wrote in his 1967 book Center of the Storm: Memoirs of John T. Scopes.

The trial ended on July 21 with a guilty verdict and $100 fine.

A year later, the ACLU issued its appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which upheld the law, but overturned the conviction of Scopes on a legal technicality.

Decades later in 1967, Tennessee repealed the act and teachers were free to teach the theories of Darwin without breaking the law.

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1925 Scopes Trial Pits Creationism Against Evolution - Voice of America

Summer is indisputably a season tailor-made for black joy. Tis the season of cookouts, stoop-sitting, rooftop bars, music and food festivals, block parties, hand fans, summer jams and all-white affairs (Diner en Blanc, if youre bougie).

And for fans of Issa Rae, it is now also the season to welcome with open and sun-kissed arms the return of her hit series Insecure (which merited a block party of its own last Saturday).

Frankly, with the level of excitement and anticipation generated by the release of the trailer alone, I was mildly surprised that the promotional campaign didnt adopt the tagline Summer Is Coming (shoutout to another HBO fave, Game of Thrones). Because while this years Emmy-nominating committee may not have felt the love (clearly, it didnt get the memo from the Golden Globes), come Sunday night, a huge swath of black America will be eagerly settling into our respective bouches to see whats new and next with Issa and Co.which is exactly what I did on my summer vacation.

Spoiler alert: This season is hella fun to watch. Malibu. (Yes, theyre actually trying to make Malibu happen. Get with the program.)

That said, I approached my second Insecure review with equal parts anticipation and trepidation. After all, last season, I garnered a substantial amount of shade for daring to express the unpopular opinion that HBOs freshest show was perhaps a bit too heavy-handed in perpetuating stale stereotypes of single, successful black womennamely, that were too thirsty to consider ourselves complete without a man in the picture. (Fun fact: You can think something is great without thinking its perfect.) With season 1 ending with both Issa and Molly unwillingly alone, would there be more self-flagellation on the menu?

But if season 2 reunites us with the crew almost exactly where we left them last fall, it now handles its heroines with a both gentler and defter hand, adding significant self-awareness to its sophomore stride.

Expectedly, our eternally awkward black girl is now trying to navigate life after Lawrence (Jay Ellis), grappling with both a broken pussy and a broken heart after her dalliance with Daniel (Ylan Noel) has effectively destroyed their five-year relationship. Its a reckoning rarely explored from a womans perspective, and the results are simultaneously heart-wrenching and hilarious.

Meanwhile, Mollyeasily the best-written best friend currently on TVis taking a more compartmentalized approach to life after her series of disappointments in season 1, opting to focus on her career rather than her relationship status. Its an extremist approach, but one that most career-driven women can relate to after weathering enough romantic disappointments. And yet, even without men in the picture, life aint automatically no crystal stair. As Mollys new therapista rare maternal figure in Insecures sea of black millennial angstacknowledges:

[A]s black women, it can feel like theres a lot of things stacked against us: We feel invisible at work; we feel the need to have the perfect relationship; its a lot. But if your shoulds didnt come to fruition, would you be open to your life looking a different way?

And its the shoulds that take center stage this season as our cast continues to struggle with insecurities and expectations about where they should be as they approach their 30s (a struggle that I can personally confirm doesnt end with your 30s). And thankfully, those insecurities remain equal opportunity; Lawrence may no longer be Issas other halfor the dude best known for his presence on the couchbut hes still got his own identity issues to deal with; namely, what really constitutes being a good dude. (Hint: It doesnt just entail having a job, a functioning penis and a basic grasp of monogamy.)

Insecures stellar supporting cast is back for more, tooalong with some fun guest appearancesand given ample opportunity to shine. The cohesion and chemistry have only become more solid this season, to hilarious effect. In particular, Natasha Rothwells standout return as Kelli (as well as a writer for the show) sets this season off with consistent and impeccable comedic timing, stoking this writers excitement for how her own HBO development deal might pan out.

Even four episodes in, its fair to say that along with the sophistiratchetry weve come to know and love from this crew, theres also plenty of self-reflection to look forward to this season. Balancing the need for independence with the need for intimacy; working out our own racial hypocrisies under the earnest and oft-patronizing gaze of white allyship; sex for sexualitys sake (as opposed to a vehicle to relationships); the inequities that often accompany being black and female at work; the reality that theres no reliable route to a happy ending; and the disappointment that sometimes comes with getting exactly what we want are all up for analysis, and the result is ... refreshing.

And as for my prior unease about the story Insecure might be telling about single black women? Well, perhaps that concern is best addressed by Molly:

Damn. I was out there like that?

Clearly, just like the rest of us, shes learning from her mistakes. Because whats the point of admitting our insecurities if theres no evolution?

Insecures second season premieres Sunday, July 23, on HBO at 10:30 p.m.

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Hella Homecoming: The Evolution of Insecure - The Root

July 20, 2017 by Elizabeth Howell , Astrobiology Magazine The researchers examined the biological processes of E.coli, a common bacteria. Credit: NIAID

A common bacteria is furthering evidence that evolution is not entirely a blind process, subject to random changes in the genes, but that environmental stressors can also play a role.

A NASA-funded team is the first group to design a method demonstrating how transposonsDNA sequences that move positions within a genomejump from place to place.

The researchers saw that the jumping rate of these transposons, aptly-named "jumping genes," increases or decreases depending on factors in the environment, such as food supply.

"This is a new window into how environment can affect evolution rates," said Nigel Goldenfeld, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute for Universal Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "We can measure evolution rates for the first time, and we can see evolution acting at the molecular level."

Thomas Kuhlman, a physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, said bacteria species can also play a role in jumping rates, as well as the environment.

"The activity of these transposal elements is not uniformly random; it's not just a pile of cells," he said.

Kuhlman and Goldenfeld recently published a paper on the research, "Real-time transposable element activity in individual live cells," in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research was led by Neil Kim, a physics graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and also included work from fellow students Gloria Lee, Nicholas Sherer and Michael Martini.

True colors

Goldenfeld studies the role of the environment on evolution, while Kuhlman focuses on the biological processes of E. coli, a common bacteria that lives in the digestive tracts of humans and animals and the cause of infections by way of contaminated feces.

The two researchers came up with a novel approach to watching the movement of jumping genes by engineering an E. coli that expresses a fluorescent protein when the transposons "jump" out of a genome. Because the cell lights up when this occurs, the researchers were able to record the cells that jump more than others.

"The cells light up only when a transposon jumps," Goldenfeld said. "So we can see how often they jump, and when they jump, and where they jump from."

Goldenfeld's team also constructed a computer simulation of the jumping activity that was able to rule out random activity as the primary reason for jumping. Once they compared the simulation with the laboratory trials, it was clear that the transposons were not jumping randomly. Goldenfeld said the findings shed more light on the mechanisms of evolution.

A fundamental assumption of evolution has been that mutations and other instabilities in the genomes randomly occur in an organism as a 'blind" evolutionary force, and those that are beneficial to the cell lead to reproductive success. Another possibility, less accepted by biologists, is that the environment prompts the cell or organism to mutate in order for the cell to prosper better. These adaptive mutations, or stress-induced mutations, occur in response to stressors in the environment.

"Our work shows that the environment does affect the rate at which transposons become active, and subsequently jump into the genome and modify it," Goldenfeld said. "Thus the implication is that the environment does change the evolution rate. What our work does not answer at this point is whether the transposon activity suppresses genes that are bad in the particular environment of the cell. It just says that the rate of evolution goes up in response to environmental stress.

"This conclusion," he added, "was already known through other studies, for certain types of mutation, so is not in itself a complete reversal of the current dogma. We hope that future work will try to measure whether or not the genome instabilities that we can measure are adaptive."

Kuhlman said he has hopes of future research on more complex organisms.

"The next step is operating in yeast, as a very simple eukaryotic cell. Then eventually much further down the road, we'll get [the process] working in mammalian or human cells."

The research is not only useful for understanding the origins of life, but also uncovering situations where cells undergo rapid mutations. One possible application could be routing out the pathways of cancer, which happens when cells abnormally grow and cause problems with the rest of the body.

Goldenfeld added that the findings also have clear implications to astrobiology.

"One of the things that astrobiology is concerned with is the interaction between the environment and the rate of evolution," he said. "Our work showed for the first time that there are environmental influences on the rate of transposon activity, because we could literally measure the effect. We did this quantitatively and compared it with theoretical predictions that assumed that transposon activity was random. We could show that the activity is not random at all."

The NASA Astrobiology Institute funded the research.

Explore further: Watching 'jumping genes' in action

More information: Neil H. Kim et al. Real-time transposable element activity in individual live cells, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2016). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1601833113

This story is republished courtesy of NASA's Astrobiology Magazine. Explore the Earth and beyond at http://www.astrobio.net .

"Jumping genes" are ubiquitous. Every domain of life hosts these sequences of DNA that can "jump" from one position to another along a chromosome; in fact, nearly half the human genome is made up of jumping genes. Depending ...

Nature is full of parasitesorganisms that flourish and proliferate at the expense of another species. Surprisingly, these same competing roles of parasite and host can be found in the microscopic molecular world of the ...

By inserting an amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)-linked human gene called TDP-43 into fruit flies, researchers at Stony Brook University and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory discovered a potential role for 'transposons' in ...

The vesper bats are the largest and best-known common family of bats, with more than 400 species spread across the globe, ranking second among mammals in species diversity.

The genome is not a fixed code but flexible. It allows changes in the genes. Transposons, however, so-called jumping genes, interpret this flexibility in a much freer way than "normal" genes. They reproduce in the genome ...

The human genome shares several peculiarities with the DNA of just about every other plant and animal. Our genetic blueprint contains numerous entities known as transposons, or "jumping genes," which have the ability to move ...

Cutting through the ocean like a jet through the sky, giant bluefin tuna are built for performance, endurance and speed. Just as the fastest planes have carefully positioned wings and tail flaps to ensure precision maneuverability ...

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered how Cas1-Cas2, the proteins responsible for the ability of the CRISPR immune system in bacteria to adapt to new viral infections, identify the site in ...

Instead of having more children, a grandmother may pass on her genes more successfully by using her cognitive abilities to directly or indirectly aid her existing children and grandchildren. Such an advantage could have driven ...

A study in fruit flies suggests that existing approaches to gene drives using CRISPR/Cas9, which aim to spread new genes within a natural population, will be derailed by the development of mutations that give resistance to ...

Every day, humans pick up on idiosyncrasies such as slow drawls, high-pitched squeaks, or hints of accents to put names to voices from afar. This ability may not be as unique as once thought, researchers report on July 20 ...

University of South Florida biologists have found that a crucial window in the development of tadpoles may influence a frog's later ability to fight infectious diseases as an adult.

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A simple bacteria reveals how stress drives evolution - Phys.Org

July 20, 2017 Inter-generational transmission, a driver for human evolution? Credit: debowscyfoto, pixabay

Instead of having more children, a grandmother may pass on her genes more successfully by using her cognitive abilities to directly or indirectly aid her existing children and grandchildren. Such an advantage could have driven the evolution of menopause in humans, according to new research published in PLOS Computational Biology.

Women go through menopause long before the end of their expected lifespan. Researchers have long hypothesized that menopause and long post-reproductive lifespan provide an evolutionary advantage; that is, they increase the chances of a woman passing on her genes. However, the precise nature of this advantage is still up for debate.

To investigate the evolutionary advantage of menopause, Carla Aim and colleagues at the Institute of Evolutionary Sciences of Montpellier developed computer simulations of human populations using artificial neural networks. Then they tested which conditions were required for menopause to emerge in the simulated populations.

Specifically, the research team used the simulations to model the emergence and evolution of resource allocation decision-making in the context of reproduction. Menopause can be considered a resource allocation strategy in which reproduction is halted so that resources can be reallocated elsewhere.

The researchers found that emergence of menopause and long post-reproductive lifespan in the simulated populations required the existence of cognitive abilities in combination with caring for grandchildren. The importance of cognitive abilities rather than physical strength lends support to a previously proposed hypothesis for the evolution of menopause known as the Embodied Capital Model.

"Cognitive abilities allow accumulation of skills and experience over the lifespan, thus providing an advantage for resource acquisition," Aim says. "Stopping reproduction during aging allows allocating more of these surplus resources to assist offspring and grand-offspring, thus increasing children's fertility and grandchildren's survival."

Explore further: Solving the evolutionary puzzle of menopause

More information: Aim C, Andr J-B, Raymond M (2017) Grandmothering and cognitive resources are required for the emergence of menopause and extensive post-reproductive lifespan. PLoS Comput Biol 13(7): e1005631. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005631

Menopause in women and females from a few other "higher" species is probably a fluke of nature rather than evolution at work, according to a study published Wednesday.

Passing on our genes to the next generation is the key process in evolution that happens through natural selection. So why do women suddenly stop having periods when they have at least a third of their lives left to live? ...

Menstruation is a reproductive quirk that humans share with only a few other mammals. But even stranger is the fact that women stop menstruating when they have a whole third of their lives left to live.

It's no secret that the risk of depression increases for women when their hormones are fluctuating. Especially vulnerable times include the menopause transition and onset of postmenopause. There's also postpartum depression ...

A new position statement by the European Menopause and Andropause Society (EMAS) published in the journal Maturitas provides a holistic model of care for healthy menopause.

An international research team, from the Universities of Exeter, Cambridge and York (UK), the Center for Whale Research (USA) and Fisheries and Oceans Canada have found that mother-daughter conflict can explain why killer ...

Cutting through the ocean like a jet through the sky, giant bluefin tuna are built for performance, endurance and speed. Just as the fastest planes have carefully positioned wings and tail flaps to ensure precision maneuverability ...

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered how Cas1-Cas2, the proteins responsible for the ability of the CRISPR immune system in bacteria to adapt to new viral infections, identify the site in ...

Instead of having more children, a grandmother may pass on her genes more successfully by using her cognitive abilities to directly or indirectly aid her existing children and grandchildren. Such an advantage could have driven ...

A study in fruit flies suggests that existing approaches to gene drives using CRISPR/Cas9, which aim to spread new genes within a natural population, will be derailed by the development of mutations that give resistance to ...

Every day, humans pick up on idiosyncrasies such as slow drawls, high-pitched squeaks, or hints of accents to put names to voices from afar. This ability may not be as unique as once thought, researchers report on July 20 ...

University of South Florida biologists have found that a crucial window in the development of tadpoles may influence a frog's later ability to fight infectious diseases as an adult.

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Use of cognitive abilities to care for grandkids may have driven evolution of menopause - Phys.Org

The Carolina Panthers open training camp on July 26 at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Heres a closer look at the Panthers' camp:

Top storyline: As quarterback Cam Newton goes, so go the Panthers. When Newton had an MVP season in 2015, the Panthers went to the Super Bowl. When he had statistically the worst season of his career in 2016, the team struggled and missed the playoffs after capturing three consecutive NFC South titles. Newton had offseason surgery to fix a partially torn rotator cuff, so training camp will be the first big test to see if the problem has been corrected. The Panthers added more weapons in first- and second-round draft picks Christian McCaffrey and Curtis Samuel. Their presence will give the 6-foot-5 quarterback more opportunities to get rid of the ball quicker and take fewer hits ... and to give him fewer reasons to run. Its an evolution for Newton and the offense, and how well that adaptation process goes will largely determine how well the Panthers do this season.

QB depth chart: Newton is coming off shoulder surgery, and the Panthers want their franchise quarterback to run less in order to safeguard his long-term health. Beyond that, nothing has changed from the past three seasons. Derek Anderson remains entrenched as the veteran and capable backup. Joe Webb is back as a third quarterback/wide receiver/special-teams player.

Bubble watch: The message that place-kicker Graham Gano needed to step up came on the third day of the draft, when the Panthers selected Harrison Butker out of Georgia Tech in the seventh round. It was the first time the Panthers drafted a place-kicker. Gano missed several big kicks that had a drastic impact on last seasons 6-10 record, and he made just 78.9 percent of his field goals.

That rookie could start: Taylor Moton. The second-round pick out of Western Michigan might be a long shot to start at right tackle, but with the future of Michael Oher uncertain and 2015 fourth-round pick Daryl Williams still somewhat unproven, Moton might get an opportunity. He impressed coaches during offseason workouts with his ability to play right and left tackle. Moton could be a year away, but if he impresses when the pads are on, hell have a chance to start now.

Kelvin Benjamin's weight: Much, probably too much, was made of the 6-foot-5 wide receiver being overweight at the start of offseason workouts. The last time that happened was two years ago, and Benjamin reported to training camp in the best shape of his career. He was arguably the MVP of that 2015 camp before suffering a season-ending knee injury. If Benjamin can return to that form and be pushed by the other receiving weapons the Panthers have added, he could be in for a big season.

Contract issues: In 2016, Greg Olsen became the first tight end in NFL history to record three consecutive seasons with 1,000 receiving yards. He wants a restructured deal to reflect that accomplishment, even though his current contract doesnt expire until after the 2018 season. Outside linebacker Thomas Davis, 34, entering the final year of his deal, also would like an extension. These are two key players and leaders, so look for the front office to do all it can to keep them happy.

For daily updates at camp, check out the Carolina Panthers clubhouse page.

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Evolution of Cam Newton, offense focus for Carolina Panthers in ... - ESPN (blog)

A recent Gallup Poll showed 38 percent of Americans agree with whats known as young earth creationism, which believes God created humanity in its present form some 10,000 years ago.

That percentage, the lowest since Gallup began asking about this in 1982, was a tie with those saying humanity developed over millions of years but God guided the process, so-called theistic evolution. Meanwhile, 19 percent said God played no part, double the number in 2000.

The long-running dispute over evolution continues to present journalists with a big challenge in providing fair treatment, particularly if they lack expertise in Bible interpretation. Thus the importance for all media professionals of Old-Earth or Evolutionary Creation?, a July book from InterVarsity Press, known for quality presentations of conservative Protestant thinking.

This dialogue book presents respectful but vigorous disagreements from two evangelical camps that share belief in God as the Creator and the full authority of the Bible. BioLogos of Grand Rapids, Mich., champions of evolutionary creation (it prefers that label to theistic evolution), which harmonizes the Bible with Darwinian evolution. Debate partner Reasons to Believe (RTB) of Covina, Calif., advocates old earth creation and criticizes standard evolutionary theory on scientific and biblical grounds.

RTB began in 1986 under leadership of the Rev. Hugh Ross, a pastor with a Ph.D. in astronomy. BioLogos was founded in 2007 by Francis Collins (.pdf here), director of the Human Genome Project and currently director of the National Institutes of Health. The two groups held 15 meetings that provide the substance of the new book.

Both BioLogos and RTB support the vastly long timeline that has long been standard among scientists. Their dialogue book sidesteps the third option of "young earth creationism," which -- here is the crucial fact to note -- journalists often depict as equal to all "creationism." This belief in an earth that's thousands rather than billions of years old is often linked with literalism on creation in six 24-hour days. That view is widespread in the Southern Baptist Convention, and theologians from that denomination posed the questions to dialogue participants.

A fourth option, also sidelined here, is the intelligent design movement, which agrees with RTB that Darwinism cannot scientifically explain the origin of species but is usually coy about arguing that God is natures designer. Here is a recent presentation: Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis by Michael Denton, a biochemistry Ph.D.

Within evangelicalism, the hottest dispute regards Adam and Eve. (The Religion Guy surveyed that discussion in a 2011 cover story for Christianity Today.) RTB embraces the traditional view that they were directly and immediately created by God rather than evolving from lower primates, and that all subsequent humans descended from these two original parents.

Biologos sees evidence of a common ancestry between humans and animals, and says humanity did not originate with a single pair but several thousand individuals, more than 100,000 years ago. Thus Adam and Eve might be a specially chosen pair or symbolic group within humanitys forebears, or literary figures in a highly compressed history of all our ancestors.

On the basis of modern genetics, BioLogos also supports the Darwinian concept that all species arose and diversified through a process of descent from a common ancestor. RTB, however, finds no sufficient proof that such processes are sufficient to account for lifes origin, history, and the design of biological systems. Then the debaters consider how to interpret the fossil evidence of hominid forms prior to homo sapiens and what defines our species, which both groups believe is unique and created in the image of God.

Heavy scientific and theological stuff, and well worth absorbing as the debates proceed. Journalists need to understand the differences between these various groups -- because there are stories there to cover.

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Fresh look at evangelicals and the evolution dispute can help guide newswriters - GetReligion (blog)

Mon got some last night welcome to TV sex in 2017. Photograph: ITV/REX/Shutterstock

A camera zooms in on a black-and-white closeup of a foot dangling from a duvet, then a wine bottle is vigorously knocked over on to the floor. A dull moan fills the room and then and really, what could be sexier? a Scottish voiceover announces something sarcastic. The next day, a girl called Montana declares, in an almost bored drawl, Mon got some last night to a gaggle of squealing girls. Welcome to TV sex in 2017.

The aforementioned scene comes from the current series of Love Island (2.4 million viewers and counting) which is merely the latest reality TV show to tap into the British publics fascination with watching real sex on screen. The question is, why are we so enthralled?

After all, it was way back in 2004 that Michelle Bass and Stuart Mitchell fashioned a makeshift hideaway under a table with some sheets and chairs on Big Brother. On the hot and sweaty journey since then, weve seen the rampant northerners of Geordie Shore pushing the boundaries of TV sex so far that Newcastle Central MP Chi Onwurah called it bordering on pornographic and threatened to take her gripes to parliament. And weve had 2012s The Valleys, which featured a trailer for its second series so hyper-sexed there was butt jiggling, boob bouncing and sheep riding that it was banned by the ASA pre-watershed.

A generation of Brits now see sex as par for the reality show course, thanks to offerings like 2013s What Happens in Kavos (which taught us that one in three Brits in Kavos had chlamydia truly a statistic to make a nation stand tall) and Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents which made horrified mums and dads privy to their childs misdemeanours via hidden cameras.

Has the novelty of seeing people get some, often through a shaky camera, not worn off yet? And is it harming the moral fibre of the nation? It really all depends on the programme. Laura Hamzic works for Brook, a sexual health charity for young people, and says shows like Love Island can provide young people with an entry point for discussion by reconciling sex with relationships.

I think were still quite quick to judge young people as being sexually irresponsible and promiscuous and thats something we would challenge, she says. They are starved of places to discuss sex and relationships in controlled environments like school, because sex education is very poor. Love Island isnt exactly the best place to learn about sex and relationships, but its better than porn.

Love Islands commissioning editor Amanda Stavri agrees, pointing out that the key to the shows success is relationships rather than sex. Our feeling is if youre inviting 12 singletons to live together in the sun, things are gonna get heated under the covers, she says. But its not salacious, its not grubby, its not explicit. Were more interested in the story of the couple who have chosen to take their relationship to the next level.

Whatever Love Islands intentions, though, the last few weeks have still seen a fair few frenzied headlines. The Mirror impatiently proclaimed Love island Olivia and Chris FINALLY have sex while OK! revealed Love Island stunned as Camilla admits to sex with Jamie. But is anyone really stunned?

Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace, who was in Big Brother back in 2006 and again in 2015, says shes surprised by how things have changed since her original time in the house.

When I did BB the first time, it felt a lot more real, and even a bit more innocent, she says. Now, its just people jumping into bed with each other to get airtime. What are we teaching the next generation with these shows? I enjoy feminism and support your right to choose, but theres a thin line between feminism and expressing yourself and just being ... a slag?

Of course, TV has to be relatable rather than just a smut-fest to connect with viewers. After all, who can forget the ill-fated scientific investigation of Channel 4s Sex Box in 2016, which operated under the guise of social science when its basic premise was sticking a camera in the faces of people who had just emerged from doing the deed in a sweat box. Despite a nationwide campaign that pulled in 1.1 million viewers for the opening episode, the number dropped by 200,000 after the first 15 minutes.

But get it right as Love Island seems to have done and the sex can complement rather than dominate the content of the show. So perhaps the evolution of sex on TV just taps into what weve always known we want to see people who are just like us. And that to see imperfect decisions made on screen is really to see ourselves.

Continued here:

More than just a smut-fest: Love Island and the evolution of reality TV sex - The Guardian

Turkey's new school curriculum drops Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and adds the concept of jihad as patriotic in spirit.

The move has fuelled fears President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is subverting the republic's secular foundations.

The chairman of a teachers' union has described the changes as a huge step in the wrong direction for Turkey's schools and an attempt to avoid raising "generations who ask questions".

Turkey's president RecepTayyip Erdogan wins referendum to greatly expand powers

Ismet Yilmaz, the country's education minister, said the controversial decision to exclude the theory of evolution was "because it is above the students' level and not directly relevant."

A member of the opposition Republican People's Party, Mustafa Balbay, said any suggestion the theory was beyond their understanding was an insult to high school students.

"You go and give an 18-year old student the right to elect and be elected, but don't give him the right to learn about the theory of evolution...This is being close minded and ignorant."

The theory of evolution is rejected by both Christian and Muslim creationists, who believe God created the world as described in the Bible and the Koran, making the universe and all living things in six days.

Mr Erdogan, accused by critics of crushing democratic freedoms with tens of thousands of arrests and a clampdown on media since a failed coup last July, has in the past spoken of raising a "pious generation".

The curriculum, effective from the start of the 2017-2018 school year, also obliges Turkey's growing number of "Imam Hatip" religious schools to teach the concept of jihad as patriotic in spirit.

"It is also our duty to fix what has been perceived as wrong. This is why the Islamic law class and basic fundamental religion lectures will include [lessons on] jihad," Mr Yilmaz told reporters. "The real meaning of jihad is loving your nation."

Jihad is often translated as "holy war" in the context of fighters waging war against enemies of Islam; but Muslim scholars stress that it also refers to a personal, spiritual struggle against sin.

A woman takes a selfienext to the statue of Omer Halisdemir in Istanbul, in front of a memorial with the names of people killed last year during the failed coup attempt(AFP/Getty Images)

Mehhmet Balik, chairman of the Union of Education and Science Workers (Egitim-Is), condemned the new curriculum.

"The new policies that ban the teaching of evolution and requiring all schools to have a prayer room, these actions destroy the principle of secularism and the scientific principles of education," he said.

Under the AKP, which came to power in 2002, the number of "Imam Hatip" religious schools has grown exponentially. Erdogan, who has roots in political Islam, attended one such school.

He has spent his career fighting to bring religion back into public life in constitutionally secular Turkey and has cast himself as the liberator of millions of pious Turks whose rights and welfare were neglected by a secular elite.

Liberal Turks see MrErdogan as attempting to roll back the work of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Western-facing founder of modern Turkey who believed education should be free of religious teachings.

A woman holds placard depicting Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan during 'National Unity March' to commemorate the one year anniversary of the July 2016 botched coup attempt (AP)

Some government critics have said the new curriculum - which was presented for public feedback earlier this year - increased the emphasis on Islamic values at the expense of Ataturk's role.

But MrYilmaz said nothing about Ataturk or his accomplishments had been removed. Changes only emphasised core values such as justice, friendship, honesty, love and patriotism.

He said discussion of the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Isisand the network of the US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara blames for last year's attempted coup, would also be added.

Mr Balik, the head of the union, said the changes were being made in an attempt to stamp out dissenting ideas.

"The bottom line is: generations who ask questions, that's what the government fears," he said.

Additional reporting by Reuters

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Turkey's new school curriculum drops evolution and will teach concept of jihad - The Independent

Acorn ants are tiny. Theyre not the ants youd notice marching across your kitchen or swarming around sidewalk cracks, but the species is common across eastern North America. In particular, acorn ants live anywhere you find oak or hickory trees: both in forests and in the hearts of cities.

Cities are a microcosm of the changes that are occurring at a planetary scale on an urbanized Earth.

Thats why theyre so interesting to Sarah Diamond, a biology professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Were comparing this little forest island within a city to traditional forest habitats, she says. Specifically, she and her colleagues are looking at how well city ants can tolerate higher temperatures compared to their rural cousins. The experiment is made possible by whats known as the urban heat island effect, which describes the tendency of the built-up infrastructure of cities think heat-absorbing concrete and asphalt, for example to create a hotter environment than less developed areas.

The urban island effect is several degrees Celsius warming as you go from rural habitats to urban habitats, Diamond says. A few degrees may not seem like a huge difference intuitively, but its on par with the amount global temperatures are expected to increase over the next decades.

The impact of climate change is something we cant simulate easily in natural ecosystems, but the artificial environment of cities may provide needed clues. We can take advantage of this unnatural experiment to see how organisms are responding to altered climatic regimes, Diamond says.

She and her team collected ant colonies from various sites in the city of Cleveland and in the surrounding countryside of Ohio. They then compared how colonies from each site adapted to the temperature conditions for both urban and rural environments. No matter how they mixed and matched temperatures, Diamond says, the urban ants always have higher heat tolerance, and they always lose their cold tolerance compared to the rural ants.

And because ants born in the lab only grow up in that environment, researchers have found that they seem to experience real genetic change, not just a shift in behavior, says Ryan Martin, one of Diamonds collaborators at Case Western. You can separate out those acclimatory effects, compared to those effects that are divergent between urban and rural ants [due to] genetic change. In other words, ants born from urban parents have higher tolerance to heat than ants born in rural environments, even when those newborn ant babies have never experienced the same conditions as their parents.

Diamond and her colleagues see the same effect in ants from places with measurably different climates, including Cincinnati, Ohio; Knoxville, Tennessee; and northern Florida. Theyre also expanding their research to include terrestrial isopods (the common critters known variously as pillbugs, sowbugs, and roly polies, among other names). The ultimate goal is to help answer a profound question: Can we predict how well some species will adapt to climate change based on how well they do in cities?

Cities do a lot more than generate heat, of course. They contaminate the soil and air, alter patterns of water drainage and sunlight exposure, radically increase noise pollution, and break up habitats. In the process, they routinely force plants, animals, and microbes to adapt or disappear. And studies have shown that the time scale for these environmental disruptions is astoundingly short compared with the usual rates of change in the natural world.

Cities are a microcosm of the changes that are occurring at a planetary scale on an urbanized Earth, says Marina Alberti, professor of urban design and planning at the University of Washington. Humans in cities are changing the rules of natures game. Empirical evidence is showing that we selectively determine which species can live in cities and cause organisms to undergo rapid evolutionary change.

A number of researchers have become interested in urban ecology because of those relatively fast changes. Most North American cities are less than a century or two old, and the number of humans living in cities has jumped dramatically over the last 100 years. Even though thats a blink of an eye compared with the history of Earth, eco-evolutionists like Diamond are finding a wealth of measurable differences between urban organisms and members of the same species living in undeveloped ecosystems. Their experiments are beginning to reveal how quickly evolution can act under pressure.

Charles Darwin began On the Origin of Species by talking about artificial selection: how humans have bred animals and plants to bring out some features and suppress others. Any number of species have been domesticated, from dogs to pigeons to corn, changing from their wild form into something different. Artificial selection can be extremely rapid, simply by controlling how domesticated species reproduce.

Urban evolution, on the other hand, is still controlled by natural selection. What separates it from normal natural selection is that humans are the indirect source of the selection pressures. Our actions restrict nesting spaces by chopping down trees, paving over places for plants to sprout, and driving out some predators while bringing in new ones like cats and dogs. And of course, we raise temperatures by replacing vegetation with concrete, building with heat-absorbing roofs, and introducing greenhouse gases such as ozone from engines.

Our findings of rapid change of many plants and animals demonstrates the power of natural selection even in our cities, says Alberti. Many species will continue to go extinct, but we show that others are evolving the necessary strategies and physical characteristics to coexist with humanity. Understanding the role we play in planetary eco-evolution will provide us with the information to make better decisions and build more sustainable urban settlements.

But how large and rapid are these changes? And how can we separate fundamental changes in organisms makeup due to evolution from behavioral shifts? For instance, city ants havent evolved into a distinct species from country ants, even if they still exhibit measurable genetic shifts. Urban-dwelling birds, on the other hand, sing at higher pitches to be heard over the noises of the city. But its unclear if that behavior is a genetic change, or if their offspring would resume normal levels of singing if they were raised in the country.

In a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Alberti and her colleagues found more than 1,600 cases from around the world in which urbanization has produced measurable evolutionary effects. Those effects include changes in the size of seeds or offspring, what kinds of food animals eat and where they nest, and how species interact with each other. The cases include plants, invertebrates (insects and so forth), and a range of vertebrates, from fish to birds.

Because of rapid urbanization, these changes occurred on the scale of centuries or less. By showing the genetic differences between urban and rural acorn ants, Diamonds experiments in Cleveland revealed that the shift must have occurred since the city began its modern period of growth. Thats roughly 100 years, or about 20 generations of acorn ant queens. And the shift might have been even faster, since were only seeing the end result, not the incremental changes since Cleveland began to change into a modern city.

Andrew Hendry of McGill University, one of Albertis coauthors on the recent study, says he suspected that the urban heat island effect is less significant than other problems city-dwelling organisms face, such as habitat loss or the breaking up of habitats into small discontinuous pieces. Even so, he added, that doesnt mean temperature isnt an important factor: When it comes to specific things the temperatures affecting, it can give us some guidelines about how fast can things evolve, what types of organisms can evolve faster or slower, or respond strongly or weakly in respect to temperature.

In other words, an organism that evolves rapidly in the city might do better in general when trying to adapt to a warming world. All the weedy, invasive species, like cabbage white butterflies, are doing fine, Diamond says. Thats little consolation, though. Just as cities contain a shadow of the biodiversity of the rural landscape they replace, climate change could result in a cascade of species loss.

Just as cities contain a shadow of the areas former biodiversity, climate change could result in a cascade of species loss.

What you find is urban populations have lower [genetic variation], says Martin. Presumably, that means theyve used up some of that variation in evolving, but it also might mean theyve lost some of their ability to respond [to environmental changes].

Diamonds ant lab is dominated by a row of environmental growth chambers. They resemble refrigerators, but their interiors can run the temperature gamut from hot summer days to cold winter nights. She opened one and presented a cup designed to hold urine samples, familiar to anyone who has undergone medical or drug tests. No ones peeing in these, she says. Were putting acorn ants in them.

Inside the cup was an entire living colony of ants crawling around their acorn nest. Each insect is smaller than one eighth of an inch long, with a body so light orange-brown in color it is almost invisible against the acorn. Acorn ant colonies usually have fewer than 100 tiny workers, which explains how they can all fit into a single nut resting in the cup.

Most species arent as easy to study as acorn ants. Theyre either too big, reproduce too slowly, or dont survive well under lab conditions. However, by focusing on these tiny creatures and how they survive in living urban laboratories, we may be starting to understand how vulnerable all species are in the uncontrolled experiment known as climate change.

Matthew R. Francis is a physicist, science writer, public speaker, educator, and frequent wearer of jaunty hats. He blogs at Galileos Pendulum.

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What City Ants Can Teach Us About Species Evolution And Climate Change - Undark Magazine

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Evolution Mining: Gold Miner Delivers Strong 4Q Barron's Evolution Mining shares last traded up 1.4% at AUD2.18. The stock is up roughly 3% this year. The rise in the value of the Australian dollar to a two year high against the greenback has seen the Australian dollar price of gold fall from a high of AUD1 ...

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MGM buys Evolution Media to expand Mark Burnett's TV division L.A. Biz MGM said Evolution will operate as Evolution Media, an MGM company, with founder and Chief Executive Douglas Ross as president of the acquired business and executive vice president of programming and development. Alex Baskin will become its ...

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A decade may not seem like a remarkably long time to have been in business, but it certainly is in the world of rooftop solar. In an industry known for its ups and downs, residential solar installer Sunrun hit the commendable milestone last week of 10 years in operation.

Executive Chairman and co-founder Ed Fenster and CEO and co-founder Lynn Jurich launched Sunrun in 2007 from an attic in San Francisco and signed the companys first customers from a booth at a county fair. Since then, Sunrun says it has built more than $2.5 billion in solar systems, saved customers more than $150 million on their energy bills and generated more than 2.4 billion kilowatt-hours of clean energy.

With more than 3,000 employees serving more than 134,000 families in 22 states (and counting), Sunrun claims its now the leading home solar company in the country.

Weve come a long way in just 10 years and are just getting started, said Jurich, in a statement.

Over the years, as technology and policy have evolved, so has Sunruns business model. Sunrun is no longer just a residential solar installer -- it now fashions itself as the nations largest dedicated residential solar, storage and energy services company. The decision to rebrand and launch the Sunrun Brilliant Home logo last December underscored the transition from pure-play solar company to a more comprehensive energy solution provider.

Then in June, Sunrun hired Audrey Lee as vice president of grid services -- yet another sign the company is expanding its presence at the grid edge. Lee, who holds a doctorate, previously served as vice president of analytics and design at Advanced Microgrid Solutions. She also worked with the U.S. Department of Energy, the California Public Utilities Commission, and the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources to develop regulatory structures that promote energy innovation.

Lees job is to figure out how behind-the-meter solar and energy storage can be leveraged as grid assets. She will oversee a new partnership with National Grid, and work with other utilities and energy partners at the wholesale level to learn how distributed energy resources (DERs) can meet the needs of the grid more efficiently.

I recently caught up with Lee at GTMs Grid Edge World Forum to discuss her new role and Sunruns new grid services initiatives. Questions and answers have been edited for readability and flow.

GTM: Talk a little more about your background and your new role at Sunrun.

LEE: I started out in government, so I have a policy backgroundand was really involved in demand response and energy storage and smart grid. Then I joined Advanced Microgrid Solutions, where I focused more on the commercial and industrial side -- thinking about how behind-the-meter energy storage could be leveraged as a grid service, and working with utilities and with the energy markets to do that. Sunrun is a really great next step for me in expanding that to the residential sector.

As our grid is evolving, you really need all of the different resources on the grid to work together and be coordinated. You need those markets to be transparent and the market signals to be clear to all the participants. I'm really looking forward to harnessing all of the solar and now the storage that Sunrun has installed, and plans to install, and integrate that into the grid so that it provides either capacity or ancillary services.

GTM: Sunrun has deployed around 1,000 BrightBox energy storage systems to date, largely in Hawaii where there is a self-supply tariff. What is the value proposition for customers in more dynamic markets like California? Is the appeal mostly backup power? Or is rate arbitrage driving customer interest?

LEE: I think you're right -- the backup and the reliability and resiliency are very attractive to customers, but also the time-of-use rates, which made arbitrage possible for residential customers. Then I think the world is an oyster in the future in terms of demand response programs that energy storage could participate in at the wholesale level. We are working with CAISO (the California Independent System Operator) on ESDER, the energy storage distributed energy resources stakeholder initiative, and holding meetings with the PUC, and looking to really expand the role of distributed energy resources. We are very optimistic about the role of residential storage in participating in the grid.

GTM: Where do you think residential energy storage will offer the most value -- at the distribution level or at the wholesale level?

LEE: I think it will be both. I mean, honestly, we're all working it out right now, right? There are so many stakeholder meetings with utilities and with aggregators and with policymakers to figure out what the role [of energy storage] is. How do existing structures, like the way utilities rate-base their assets, evolve? And how do they procure DERs? The great thing about storage paired with solar is that it's so flexible; it can provide all these different kinds of grid services. I feel like the technology is there; it's really up to us to figure out the regulatory framework and the market framework to leverage that technology.

Storage could play at the very local level on a circuit, on a feeder line to resolve backflow or voltage issues, or at a substation level to defer distribution upgrades or substation upgrades. [It can help with] local reliability and system reliability, and its a matter of aggregators working with utilities to pull that all together to make it work. [At the wholesale level] we're still figuring out the roles and responsibilities, the rules, and the market signals to do that.

GTM: How fast are things progressing at the wholesale level? We know there is an ongoing discussion about opening up wholesale markets to energy storage and distributed energy resources at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Meanwhile, PJM has already established a frequency regulation market and became the largest market for energy storage. California also has rules that allow DERs to participate at the wholesale level. But when I spoke to CAISO earlier this year, representatives mentioned that the software and communications side of aggregating DERs still needed more work, so that the grid operator could be sure they would respond when needed.

LEE: I think from a technology perspective, it's new, so of course the CAISO [is cautious]. They're in charge of reliability for the grid; they need to be very conservative about this stuff. So it's a matter of doing projects together, showing them the data and getting everybody comfortable with this. And there's no better way than to actually try it out and prove it to the utility, as a distribution operator, and prove it to the CAISO that it can be done.

I know that a lot of utilities have pilots and are working with various partners on that. We don't have anything to announce at this point, but working with utilities to demonstrate [how DERs can operate in wholesale markets] is definitely something that we're very interested in. [] There is a great role for an aggregator like Sunrun to orchestrate what the storage does and coordinate, cooperate with the utility and the CAISO on this.

GTM: Do you think a Sunrun or another third party will play the DER aggregator in wholesale markets? Or will the utility?

LEE: I think it's going to be a mixture depending on the territory and the regulatory framework. I think Sunrun has a relationship with the customer -- we set up the contract with the customer and we know how that resource is used. [] And so I think we want to maintain Sunrun's relationship with the customer and then coordinate with the utility. If the utility were to manage thousands and thousands of systems, I imagine it would be a headache for them, so I think that it's going require cooperation and partnership with the utility. We want to make sure that the utility gets what it wants in terms of awareness and monitoring of what's going on with the assets, so they can depend on it for grid services.

GTM: This is an interesting time for DERs. On the one hand, there are discussions taking place around the country about the need to preserve net metering and favorable policies for rooftop solar. On the other, there's a transition to more time- and location-based rates taking place, which may be less appealing to rooftop solar, but help to support storage and the broader grid edge transformation weve been discussing. How would you characterize the way DER policies are taking shape in the U.S.?

LEE: At the end of the day, at Sunrun we want clean, renewable energy. We also want to reduce costs to customers. And I think those are the goals for a lot of regulatory commissions and utilities as well, so I think we all agree on that endgame, and it's a matter of deciding what the technology toolbox to make that happen is, and what are the right price signals to incentivize clean energy and reliable energy.

That's why we have this partnership with National Grid, because I think we are really able to leverage each other's strengths in doing that. National Grid is the grid operator in the U.K., so they really understand energy markets and transmission systems, and then of course they have their regulated side on the East Coast [of the U.S.] running a distribution company. And then Sunrun...has the relationship with the customer and the distributed energy experience, so we think that partnership really allows us to tackle this big problem and figure out how to make it work.

GTM: Yes, so Sunrun partnered with National Grid in January. We know the partnership includes a joint marketing agreement to accelerate solar adoption in New York state, a collaborative pilot to explore how DERs can be aggregated and used to help balance the grid, and a $100 million direct investment by National Grid in approximately 200 megawatts of residential solar assets across all of Sunruns markets. Where does progress on that partnership stand today?

LEE: The joint marketing is off the ground and their investment in us is starting to pan out. In terms of the grid services, were just starting to figure that out. [] We're trying to figure out where it makes sense to deploy solar-plus-storage and grid services.

[National Grid] is bringing in their expertise on the distribution, transmission and wholesale market side, and we're bringing in our experience on the customer side. [] Its my job to get some good projects in the ground and then announce them to you.

GTM: How important do you think it is that solar companies like Sunrunlead in the grid services space? Other companies could take on that role. But the CEO of Cypress Creek, for instance, believes solar companies (large-scale, in his case) mustlead on energy storageor get left behind.

LEE: Sunrun is really proactive and stepping up as a solar company to figure all of this out. And I think it's very important, because Sunrun touches so many customers. You need to bring ratepayers with you -- they're the customers and you need to make them part of the solution. Sunrun has that great relationship with the customer and is able to do that. I'm not saying Sunrun's going to solve everything, it's not going to operate the grid completelybut I think Sunrun's really stepping up.

GTM: How is Sunrun marketing to DER customers today? Has the process changed now that energy storage is involved?

LEE: Sunrun has come a long way in making the process of educating the customer and selling solar so efficient. And so I think adding on storage to the platform that they have already created is a small step. That platform is the operations, the people, the sales team and the installers, but it's also the software platform and making it really simple for the customer to understand what their electricity consumption is, what their rooftop solar is producing and how it's benefiting them. Because people don't think about electricity all the time -- you've got to make it interesting to them and important to them.

Also, as a solar customer myself, I want to know that my solar company is going be around, and I think Sunrun has really demonstrated that, and the same thing with storage. There's more involvement because there's more control required and more active participation from that storage into the grid, so customers want to know that there's a strong company backing that installation.

Sunrun has been around for 10 years, and that's no small thing.

GTM: Tesla recently gave up on door-to-door sales and shifted its marketing practice online. Does Sunrun also sell online right now?

LEE: We do both, but at some point there will be a human-to-human, face-to-face interaction. We can lead-generate through online [platforms], but at some point we're going to send someone out to make sure the home is suitable. [...] I think that co-marketing is a growth area for us with partnerships like with National Grid.

GTM: Weve talked about rooftop solar and residential energy storage. Can you also describe the role you see Sunrun playing in home energy management?

LEE: I mean, it makes sense; we already have that customer relationship in their home, in terms of solar, so its a really small step to do storage and to do home energy management.

I think Lynn and Ed have great ambitions to continue to be one of the premier, best home energy management companies in the country. I couldn't speak specifically to the different parts of that [strategy], but we certainly are a home energy management company at this point.

GTM: How do you think Sunrun will reach the next level of customers? Some of the mature solar markets have recently started to slow. Will grid services start to open up new opportunities?

LEE: Sunrun recently doubled its total available market by going into other states -- New Mexico, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, Wisconsin, Washington, D.C., and Florida. We also re-entered Nevada and expanded operations in Pennsylvania. So it seems like there's a ton of room to grow, and of course, from my perspective, we would want to grow with energy services in those markets as well.

GTM: Do you think more work still needs to be done for a rooftop solar company like Sunrun to convince utilities that youre both on the same team?

LEE: Yeah. [] I really want to sit down at the table with utilities and figure out, What are your problems? How can we help solve them? What's the best way for us to work together?" Our solar-plus-storage resources are here for the grid, we want to be compensated fairly for them, of course, and operate in a very fair and transparent market, but really, there's value in this technology. We just need to figure out how to set up the rules and work together.

Link:

Sunrun's Evolution From Home Solar Installer to Comprehensive Energy Solution Provider - Greentech Media

Evolution Mining has lifted output and cut costs in the June quarter, helping it easily hit full-year production and cost guidance.

Australia's second largest gold miner produced 218,079 ounces in the three months to June 30, nearly 7.5 per cent more than the prior quarter and its highest ever quarterly output.

That helped it push up full-year production to 844,124 ounces of gold, near the top end of its 800,000 to 860,000 ounce guidance range.

"Evolution's diversified portfolio delivered across the board in the June 2017 quarter," the company said in a statement.

"Ernest Henry, Mt Carlton, Edna May and Cracow all produced their best quarter of the financial year."

All-in sustaining cost dropped to $825 an ounce for the quarter, taking the full-year figure to $905 an ounce, an improvement of 11 per cent over the previous year and within the targeted $900 to $960 an ounce range.

Royal Bank of Canada analyst Paul Hissey called its a strong quarter capping off a good year for the company.

"While this result was strong, we take a step back and consider options for Evolution given most of the company's assets are performing well," he said.

"While the company has stated they are pursuing a turnaround strategy at Edna May (mine), speculation persists around the assets ongoing place within the company."

Recent media reports have speculated that Evolution has been approached by a number of potential buyers for the Edna May mine in WA.

The company last year sold its Pajingo gold mine in Queensland to Chinese-owned Minjar Gold for about $50 million as part of efforts to improve its asset portfolio.

On Thursday, the company said it had realised record operating cash flow of $200.4 million in the June quarter, boosting full-year cash flow by 12 per cent to $706.5 million.

The strong cash flow helped it repay $125 million of debts during the quarter, taking net debt to $399 million, it said.

By 1130 AEST, Evolution shares were up 1.9 per cent to $2.19 in a firm Australian market.

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It's likely a once in a lifetime opportunity. Right now, there is a 2006 Mitsubishi Evolution IX MR for sale and it's brand new. As in, it's never been driven off of the dealership lot and it's never been registered.

With only nine miles on the odometer, a California-based dealership has waited patiently to put the 2006 Evolution MR up for sale on eBay. When it was new, the rally-inspired sports car arrived with a $37,000 MSRP, but bidders have inflated the auction price past six figures. As of this writing, the highest bid is $100,300. Wow.

The Evolution MR arrived with a 6-speed manual transmission over other Evolutions' 5-speed manual. It also had Bilstein shocks, BBS wheels, and MR badging to signify its "Mitsubishi Racing" roots. It was the top dog of Evos more than 10 years ago.

So, how did this California dealer end up with this car? A Reddit commenter stated the dealershipSouth Coast Mitsubishiwas notorious after it bought up a bushel of Evolution IXsat the time of the car's launch. The dealer let the cars sit and sold them years later, likely to the tune of fat profits. This Evo IX MR maybe the icing atop the dealer's collector car treasure chest.

What this means for used Evolution MR values is uncertain, but there is clearly a demand for low-mileage Japanese sports cars. But more than $100,000 for an 11-year-old car? Ring us if and when an Evolution wagon surfaces for sale. In the meantime, there are a handful ofEvolution X Final Editions looking for loving owners at much lower prices.

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A brand-new 2006 Mitsubishi Evolution MR is currently for sale on eBay - Motor Authority

MGM has acquired unscripted television production company Evolution Media, the company announced Tuesday.

Evolution Media is behind hit unscripted series like The Real Housewives of Orange County, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and Vanderpump Rules for Bravo, as well as Botched for E!. The company will operate as Evolution Media, an MGM Company, with founder and CEO Douglas Ross to become the president of the acquired business and executive vice president of programming and development Alex Baskin to become its president of programming and development, both reporting to Barry Poznick, MGMs president of unscripted television. The business will continue to operate out of its current Burbank headquarters under Ross and Baskin (pictured above).

Founded 30 years ago by Ross, Evolution Media has produced over 50 series including the inaugural seasons of CBSs Big Brother and NBCs Fear Factor, as well as Disney Channels Bug Juice and TLCs 10 Years Younger.

The shows that Evolution produces are a perfect complement to our slate. Their slick style, high quality and one-of-a-kind casts connect with audiences and generate epic social media engagement. Im proud to welcome them to the team and together we will continue to produce content that makes headlines, Poznick said.

The acquisition of Evolution Media further enhances MGM Televisions position in the unscripted space. MGM Television, which is headed by Mark Burnett, currently has hit series on all four major TV networks, including Survivor for CBS, The Voice for NBC, Shark Tank on ABC, Beat Shazam on Fox, and Steve Harveys Funderdome on ABC.

After 30 years of being fiercely independent, we couldnt be more proud and excited to join forces with the dynamic, creative and supportive leadership team at MGM, Ross said. We look forward to working with Gary, Mark and Barry to supercharge Evolution and to write the next chapters in the companys history with them.

Evolution Media is represented by Alan Braun and David Gross at CAA and was represented in the transaction by Bryan Bowles and Ron Milkes of Bryor Media Partners and Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton. MGM was represented in the transaction by Latham & Watkins LLP.

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MGM Acquires 'Real Housewives,' 'Vanderpump Rules' Producer Evolution Media - Variety

July 18, 2017 In his lab, Lang employs robotic technology to deposit yeast dilutions into culture plates, propagating 288 populations at a time. He then freezes these samples at -80 degrees, which allows him to create fossil records of his experiments. Credit: Lehigh University

Genes provide instructions to cells in the body telling them what to do and not do in order to function optimally. Small changes in genes, called mutations, can have major consequences. Similar to a glitch in a computer's coding, a glitch in gene coding can cause a cell's system to go haywire. Not all mutations are bad, however. The process of adaptive evolution selects for mutations that promote rapid and unchecked growth, both in yeast populations and in cancer.

As a cancer cell reproduces by cloning itself, a number of mutations are passed along to successive generations. Some of these are "hitchhikers"along for the ride, but basically harmlessand others are "driver" mutations, responsible for cancer's growth.

Such mutations may be cancer's greatest strength, but they could also be its Achilles' heel: targeting driver mutations with treatment could inhibit the cancer's growth.

Precision medicine in cancer treatment proposes to use genome sequencing to identify which gene mutation or mutations are responsible for driving the growth of a patient's cancer cells, but for this to be practical, it must be possible to identify the cancer-causing driver mutations.

Unfortunately, identifying exactly which mutations are drivers in the human genome is like trying to find a needle in the proverbial haystack.

One possible solution: look at mutations in a smaller haystack.

Gregory Lang, assistant professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University, and his team are exploring how genomes evolve over thousands of generations using laboratory populations of yeast, which has a genome that is one thousandth the size of the human genome. Yeast, the same one used in baking and in brewing beer, reproduces rapidly by division making it a good model system for studying adaptive evolution in an asexual population, like cancer.

"Yeast undergoes one generation every 90 minutesten generations within 24 hours," says Lang. "Unlike human cancer cells, we can maintain hundreds of identical yeast populations in the lab and then evolve them for thousands of generations."

Lang and his colleagues recently applied such a large-scale approach to quantify the effect on growth of 116 mutations from 11 lineages of experimentally-evolved yeast populations. They found that only 20% of the mutations that succeed are drivers; the rest are along for the ride. Their results have been published in an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) called: "Hitchhiking and epistasis give rise to cohort dynamics in adapting populations," co-authored by Sean W. Buskirk and Ryan Emily Peave.

"If you want to get a realistic picture of the evolutionarily significant spectrum of mutations that promote growth, a comprehensive study of individual mutations is neededsomething that would be very difficult to conduct using the human genome," says Lang. "In our experiments with yeast, we are able 'shuffle the deck' to isolate thousands of sporesall from the same ancestoreach with a random combination of evolved mutations to analyze. This large-scale approach allows us to measure, with great precision, the fitness effect of each mutation. We can then quantify how important certain mutations or combinations of mutations were to growth."

"Shuffling the deck" to understand gene mutations

Once Lang and his colleagues shuffled the yeast population's genetic deck, they used whole genome sequencing to infer which mutations or combinations of mutations were driving growth.

"The hitchhikers would not increase in frequency," says Lang. "The drivers would increase at a rate that's proportional to their fitness effect."

Instead of searching for common mutationsas is being done for some cancer genomesand then inferring that those mutations must be the drivers, Lang's approach measures the effects of all mutations, enabling the identification of subtler dynamics.

By directly measuring the fitness effects of all mutations in 1,000 generations of a single yeast strain, the researchers were able to unambiguously identify and quantify the fitness effects of driver mutations that could otherwise be missed by recurrence-based methods.

"Comparing our results to previous recurrence-based methods we had tried, we found that we had missed dynamics that had 'weak' or small effects, as well as rare mutations," says Lang.

The team identified one mutational group in which mutations combined to provide a fitness benefit greater than the sum of their individual effects. In other words, the interaction of two mutations that were passed down together positively impacted growth. Neither had an substantial effect on its own.

Though the yeast genome has been studied extensively, this genetic interaction had not been previously identified.

According to Lang, the discovery is an illustration of the power of experimental evolution to select for combinations of mutations that increase growth and of their approach for identifying such interactions.

Lang says it is unlikely that the exact mutations his team discovered in yeast occurs in cancer. However, he believes that understanding the dynamics of adaptation in yeast could provide insight into gene mutation dynamics in other systems, such as cancer.

"In yeast we have the tools to answer types of questions that we would love to be able to answer for cancer populations," says Lang

"Future work will include identifying additional genetic interactions in yeast," says Lang. "Experimental evolution is a good way to enhance our current understanding of the role in adaptation of individual mutations and the interactions between themknowledge that could one day lead to advances in human healthcare."

Explore further: New statistical analysis reveals thousands of rare mutations linked with cancer

More information: Hitchhiking and epistasis give rise to cohort dynamics in adapting populations, Sean W. Buskirk, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1702314114 , http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/17/1702314114.full

Scientists have identified thousands of previously ignored genetic mutations that, although rare, likely contribute to cancer growth. The findings, which could help pave the way to new treatments, are published in PLOS Computational ...

Scientists have mapped how thousands of genetic mutations can affect a cell's chances of survival.

In a twist on "survival of the fittest," researchers have discovered that evolution is driven not by a single beneficial mutation but rather by a group of mutations, including ones called "genetic hitchhikers" that are simply ...

COSMIC-3D, the most comprehensive system for exploring cancer mutations in three dimensions, is launched today by COSMIC, based at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, in collaboration with Astex Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge, ...

As for many other biomedical and biotechnology disciplines, the genome scissor "CRISPR/Cas9" also opens up completely new possibilities for cancer research. Scientists of the National Center for Tumor Disease (NCT), the German ...

Einstein researchers have developed and validated a method for accurately identifying mutations in the genomes of single cells. The new method, which can help predict whether cancer will develop in seemingly healthy tissue, ...

Male live-bearing fish are evolving faster than female fish, according to a Kansas State University study, and that's important for understanding big-picture evolutionary patterns.

Researchers led by Martin Jinek of the University of Zurich have found an unprecedented mechanism by which bacteria defend themselves against invading viruses. When the bacterial immune system gets overwhelmed, the CRISPR-Cas ...

The size and swimming speed of sperm are controlled by a single supergene in birds, according to a new study by the University of Sheffield.

From the tiny chihuahua to the massive Saint Bernard, domestic dogs today trace their roots to a single group of wolves that crossed the path of humans as long as 40,000 years ago, researchers said Tuesday.

Bornean orangutans living in forests impacted by human commerce seek areas of denser canopy enclosure, taller trees, and sections with trees of uniform height, according to new research from Carnegie's Andrew Davies and Greg ...

Genes provide instructions to cells in the body telling them what to do and not do in order to function optimally. Small changes in genes, called mutations, can have major consequences. Similar to a glitch in a computer's ...

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Large-scale study of adaptation in yeast could help explain the evolution of cancer - Phys.Org

That's mostly a good thing. The original Splatoon was something of an experiment, a Nintendo game that focused on online play as the primary selling point. The game succeeded by being something unique: a frantic, multiplayer shooter that dripped with personality and cultivated a ravenous community of loyal fans. Splatoon 2 basically picks up where the original left off, starting with the same core game mechanic that incentivized teamwork over individual victory: Turf War.

To understand Turf War -- and Splatoon 2's primary multiplayer modes -- you need to know a few things. First, there are no bullets in Splatoon. Instead, players use a mix of squirt guns, paintbrushes and buckets to spray, fling and slosh colored ink across the battlefield. Battles aren't won by how many enemies the player defeats but by how much of her team's color covers the ground at the end of a match.

Sure, you can take out other players in these matches, and you'll need to to win, but it's not the end goal. By rewarding players based on how much ground they cover, the game passively changes the focus from being the best fighter to contributing the most to the team victory. It also takes the pressure off casual players. No good in a firefight? You can still contribute by focusing on keeping the ground your team's color.

The paint mechanic is more than just a gimmick to promote teamwork -- it also changes how you can move. If the ink on the ground belongs to the player's team, she can turn into a squid and swim through it to replenish ammo and move faster. If it's the enemy team's color, she'll be slowed down and take damage. There are a few more rules, of course, but the long and short of it is that Splatoon 2 offers a multiplayer experience unlike anything in other games. Its unique twist on movement, weapons and ink-based victory helps keep game modes like tower defense, control point and capture-the-flag feeling fresh.

So what's new about Splatoon 2? Well, a few things. For one, the entire experience just looks better: Colors are more vibrant and bright; player characters, weapons and clothing are far more detailed; and best of all, the entire game runs at a noticeably higher frame rate. There are also new levels, weapon upgrades and special moves that change the way the game is played. The new Splat Dualie pistols, for instance, open up player movement by adding a dodge roll to the game, which drastically changes how close-range combat unfolds. Other weapons have been tweaked to give them more balance, adding a long-range attack for roller weapons, for instance, or allowing long-range weapons to hold a charge while players swim through ink.

Nintendo's decision to stick close to the original mostly works: Splatoon 2 strengthens the series' core gameplay, gives players more tools to use in battle and retains the spirit of fun that made the first entry a hit. Unfortunately, it also retains a handful of the first game's awkward flaws.

Multiplayer modes and maps are still limited to a two-at-a-time rotation that changes every few hours, for instance. Players still can't change weapon and gear loadouts without quitting multiplayer and jumping back in either. (Being able to switch weapons between matches would have been a huge quality-of-life improvement.) These aren't deal breakers, but it would have been nice to see some more of the game's rough edges ironed out in the sequel.

The sameness of Splatoon 2 falls flat in the single player campaign, however. The game's Hero Mode very much follows the vein of the original, serving as training for the main event: multiplayer. It's basically a set of linear levels that introduces the game's core concepts. Here's a level that teaches you how to swim through ink to make longer jumps. Here's one designed to teach you how charge weapons work.

As a basic gameplay tutorial, Splatoon 2's single-player mode is a good introduction for folks new to the series, but players who have sharpened their teeth on multiplayer (or just played the first game) might find it a bit tedious -- and that's a shame, because it's framed around a light and fun story that revisits characters from the first game.

The entire time I played Hero Mode, I felt like it could have been something great. It almost was too: Every now and then, the campaign will throw an incredible boss fight at you or a complex, joyously fun level that calls back to the best of games like Super Mario Galaxy. Instead, the single-player campaign is merely an OK experience with a few great moments.

Despite this, Splatoon 2 is still a fantastic experience for Nintendo Switch owners looking for a fun, addictive multiplayer game. It didn't learn every lesson it could have from its predecessor, but it delivers on the core gameplay mechanics that made the original an unexpected hit. Better still, it retains the original game's cultural identity by building a community around Splatoon's in-game hosts and by showcasing artwork made by players in a Miiverse-like drawing app.

Splatoon 2 is everything it needs to be and nothing more. If you're OK with that, you'll love it. Just don't buy it for the single-player campaign alone.

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'Splatoon 2' is a cautious but excellent evolution of the original - Engadget

NASHVILLE, Tenn. The famed Scopes monkey trial pitted two of the nations foremost celebrity lawyers against one another, but only one of them was memorialized outside the Tennessee courthouse where the landmark case unfolded until now.

On Friday at the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton the public will behold a 10-foot statue of the rumpled skeptic Clarence Darrow, who argued for evolution in the 1925 trial. It will stand at a respectful distance on the opposite side of the courthouse from an equally huge statue of William Jennings Bryan, the eloquent Christian defender of the biblical account of creation, which was installed in 2005.

The trial that unfolded there nine decades ago garnered national headlines in what historians say started as a publicity stunt for the small town. Formally known as Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes, the case generated front-page headlines nationwide and was immortalized in songs, books, plays and movies. Dayton hosts its annual Scopes Trial festival for 10 days, starting Friday, featuring a theatrical production.

Historians say the trial came about after local leaders convinced Scopes, a 24-year-old high school teacher, to answer the American Civil Liberties Unions call for someone who could help challenge Tennessees law that banned teaching evolution. He was found guilty but didnt spend time in jail.

Bryan, a three-time Democratic candidate for president, died just five days after the trial ended.

In Dayton, home of a Christian college thats named for Bryan, its not hard to envision the community accepting a statue venerating the august champion of the faith.

But Darrow is another matter.

Rifts over evolution and creationism continue almost a century later, and the Darrow statue was requested by atheist groups.

Pockets of opposition in the town suggest many Christians still see the science of evolution as clashing with their faith. Dayton resident and minister June Griffin has led much of the backlash against the Darrow statue, citing religious convictions.

This is a hideous monstrosity, Griffin said. And God is not pleased.

Two weeks ago about 20 supporters and 20 protesters clashed peacefully at the courthouse over the statue, said Rhea County Sheriffs Department Special Projects Coordinator Jeff Knight.

Nevertheless, the Darrow statue hasnt drawn teeming crowds in Dayton like the ones that forced some of the 1925 trial proceedings to be moved outdoors.

Regardless of how peoples beliefs differ, the statue helps represent history, said Rhea County historian Pat Guffey. Most people seem OK with it, she added.

I just think that something that is history should stay, or should be put up, no matter what, Guffey said. I dont think we should try to change history.

Philadelphia-based sculptor Zenos Frudakis crafted the new statue, funded largely by $150,000 from the Freedom from Religion Foundation. The group said the project would remedy the imbalance of Bryan standing alone.

Bryan was there as an attorney, a prosecutor, and Clarence Darrow as a defense attorney. And now, the history has been restored, Frudakis said.

Frudakis, an admirer of Darrow, said the sculpture offers an honest look at the lawyer.

He looks like he slept in his suit, which he often did. Sometimes his shirts were torn, Frudakis said of Darrow. He smoked too much. He drank too much. He was a womanizer. I got as much of that as I could in the sculpture. (AP)

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'Scopes monkey trial' town erects evolution figure's statue - The Philadelphia Tribune

The researchers examined the biological processes of E.coli, a common bacteria. Credit: NIAID

A common bacteria is furthering evidence that evolution is not entirely a blind process, subject to random changes in the genes, but that environmental stressors can also play a role.

A NASA-funded team is the first group to design a method demonstrating how transposons DNA sequences that move positions within a genome jump from place to place.

The researchers saw that the jumping rate of these transposons, aptly-named jumping genes, increases or decreases depending on factors in the environment, such as food supply.

This is a new window into how environment can affect evolution rates, said Nigel Goldenfeld, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute for Universal Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We can measure evolution rates for the first time, and we can see evolution acting at the molecular level.

Thomas Kuhlman, a physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, said bacteria species can also play a role in jumping rates, as well as the environment.

The activity of these transposal elements is not uniformly random; its not just a pile of cells, he said.

Kuhlman and Goldenfeld recently published a paper on the research, Real-time transposable element activity in individual live cells, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research was led by Neil Kim, a physics graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and also included work from fellow students Gloria Lee, Nicholas Sherer and Michael Martini.

The NASA Astrobiology Institute funded the research.

True colors

Twinkling transposons in live cells. Credit: Nigel Goldenfeld and Thomas Kuhlman

Goldenfeld studies the role of the environment on evolution, while Kuhlman focuses on the biological processes of E. coli, a common bacteria that lives in the digestive tracts of humans and animals and the cause of infections by way of contaminated feces.

The two researchers came up with a novel approach to watching the movement of jumping genes by engineering an E. coli that expresses a fluorescent protein when the transposons jump out of a genome. Because the cell lights up when this occurs, the researchers were able to record the cells that jump more than others.

The cells light up only when a transposon jumps, Goldenfeld said. So we can see how often they jump, and when they jump, and where they jump from.

Goldenfelds team also constructed a computer simulation of the jumping activity that was able to rule out random activity as the primary reason for jumping. Once they compared the simulation with the laboratory trials, it was clear that the transposons were not jumping randomly. Goldenfeld said the findings shed more light on the mechanisms of evolution.

A fundamental assumption of evolution has been that mutations and other instabilities in the genomes randomly occur in an organism as a blind evolutionary force, and those that are beneficial to the cell lead to reproductive success. Another possibility, less accepted by biologists, is that the environment prompts the cell or organism to mutate in order for the cell to prosper better. These adaptive mutations, or stress-induced mutations, occur in response to stressors in the environment.

Our work shows that the environment does affect the rate at which transposons become active, and subsequently jump into the genome and modify it, Goldenfeld said. Thus the implication is that the environment does change the evolution rate. What our work does not answer at this point is whether the transposon activity suppresses genes that are bad in the particular environment of the cell. It just says that the rate of evolution goes up in response to environmental stress.

This conclusion, he added, was already known through other studies, for certain types of mutation, so is not in itself a complete reversal of the current dogma. We hope that future work will try to measure whether or not the genome instabilities that we can measure are adaptive.

Kuhlman said he has hopes of future research on more complex organisms.

The next step is operating in yeast, as a very simple eukaryotic cell. Then eventually much further down the road, well get [the process] working in mammalian or human cells.

The research is not only useful for understanding the origins of life, but also uncovering situations where cells undergo rapid mutations. One possible application could be routing out the pathways of cancer, which happens when cells abnormally grow and cause problems with the rest of the body.

Goldenfeld added that the findings also have clear implications to astrobiology.

One of the things that astrobiology is concerned with is the interaction between the environment and the rate of evolution, he said. Our work showed for the first time that there are environmental influences on the rate of transposon activity, because we could literally measure the effect. We did this quantitatively and compared it with theoretical predictions that assumed that transposon activity was random. We could show that the activity is not random at all.

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A Simple Bacteria Reveals How Stress Drives Evolution - Astrobiology Magazine (registration)

Imagine if nature or the circumstances of your environment forced you to adapt in a dramatic way. What if, for example, you had to learn to jump higher to reach your food or adjust your body temperature to survive in colder temperatures?

The animals here have accomplished similar feats just to stay alive. One rodent built up such a tolerance to the poison used to exterminate it that it now eats the poison as food. One African bee escaped from captivity to breed with other bees and create a more deadly version of itself. In doing so, these and other animals have developed superpower-like abilities that don't seem possible.

Periplaneta japonica, a cockroach from Japan, can withstand freezing temperatures and snow. (Photo: Lyle Buss/University of Florida)

New York City residents may recall the 2013 headlines about an Asian cockroach found in High Line Park on Manhattans West Side that can withstand frigid temperatures and snow. An exterminator found the bug and thought it looked different than your typical NYC roach, so he sent it to the University of Florida for analysis.

Rutgers insect biologists Jessica Ware and Dominic Evangelista identified the species as Periplaneta japonica, marking the first time the Asian cockroach has been found in the United States. Scientists believe the critter hitched a ride from overseas along with some ornamental plants being used to decorate the park.

About 20 years ago colleagues of ours in Japan reared nymphs of this species and measured their tolerance to being able to survive in snow. As the species has invaded Korea and China, there has been some confirmation that it does very well in cold climates, so it is very conceivable that it could live outdoors during winter in New York. That is in addition to its being well suited to life indoors alongside the species that already are here," Ware and Evangelista said in a statement.

But don't worry: You won't find swarms of freeze-resistant roaches around the Big Apple. Because this species is very similar to cockroach species that already exist in the urban environment, they likely will compete with each other for space and for food," said Evangelista. And as they compete, their combined numbers inside buildings could actually fall because more time and energy spent competing means less time and energy to devote to reproduction," Ware added.

The Daily Mirror newspaper cover story on giant poison-proof rats in Liverpool, England. (Photo: Jonathan Deamer/flickr)

In 2014, residents of Liverpool, England, smelled a rat a giant one, in fact. So they called in pest control experts, who caught the rats and found some that were as big as cats. (It would sound like a Dr. Seuss rhyme if it weren't such a disturbing concept.)

But not only were these rodents huge, they were also immune to poison.

Rat-catchers there told The Telegraph that calls about rat infestations had risen 15 percent and that the rodents were unaffected by traditional poisons in fact, they gorged themselves on it. The use of anything stronger would require legislation, experts said.

Studies have shown that genetic mutations had produced a new type of "super rat" that accounts for up to 75 percent of the rat population in some areas of England.

Invasive garden ants (Lasius neglectus) nurse a sick friend back to health. (Photo: Chris Pull/Wikimedia Commons)

England can't catch a break when it comes to freaky animal adaptations. A so-called "super ant" from Asia was first found in Gloucestershire in 2009, and wildlife experts sounded an alarm a fire alarm, to be exact.

The problems with them are they seem to get attracted to electricity and they can take up residence in plug sockets and power sources, creating a fire hazard," Jo Hodgkins, a wildlife adviser at the National Trust told The Telegraph. Because the ants are drawn to outlets and cables, they can spark fires. They can easily establish themselves in somewhere like Britain and I would not be surprised if they colonised other areas. They are pretty tough little creatures.

The ants, which are an invasive species that's relatively new to Europe, tend to nest in enormous numbers, according to the Invasive Species Compendium. More than 35,000 were found in that Gloucestershire nest.

Mellifera scutellata, an African honey bee, also known as an Africanized bee. (Photo: Jeffrey W. Lotz, Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services/Wikimedia Commons)

These bees are like next generation honeybees. African honeybees reached the Americas when they were imported to Brazil in 1956 for cross-breeding with the local population, according to the Smithsonian. The goal was to produce more honey, but a few years later, swarms of bees and a few dozen queens escaped and formed hybrid populations with European honeybees. The bees spread north through South and Central America at a rate of 100 to 200 miles per year, and they're now as far north as the southern United States.

Also known as Africanized bees, so-called "killer bees" have earned their name. The Smithsonian explains:

Formosan termites cause about $1 billion in damage each year in the Southern United States. (Photo: Scott Bauer/Wikimedia Commons)

What makes these termites so special? Their voracious billion-dollar appetites.

Formosan termites hail from East Asia and now occupy about a dozen states in the southern U.S., costing about $1 billion a year in property damages, repairs and control measures, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

A colony, which contains about a million termites, won't just infest one building or one tree; they'll divide and conquer your entire property. So protecting one or the other from termites isn't an effective strategy.

In Florida and Louisiana, for example, pest control experts take a multi-pronged approach, including chemicals, bait traps and studying the insect to "exploit weaknesses in the pest's biology, growth, chemical communication, and behavior," the USDA says. The bait traps don't kill on contact, so the termite takes the poison back to the colony.

Along the river Tarn in France, catfish have evolved and, like their feline namesakes, developed a fondness for birds pigeons, to be specific. But how can a fish hunt a bird? Watch the video above and you'll see.

Just like killer whales launch themselves onto shorelines to snatch sea lions before wiggling back into the ocean, catfish take a similar approach. They lie in wait in shallow water until a clueless pigeon wanders just a little too close. Then they lurch out of the water, strand themselves onshore for a moment and thrash back into the river ideally with a catch.

Drug-resistant bacteria are emerging around the world, making bacterial infections a threat once again. (Photo: Sirirat/Shutterstock)

Antibiotics, one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century, have saved millions of lives against bacterial infections. But now, drug-resistant bacteria are emerging worldwide, according to the National Institute of Health (NIH), and bacterial infections are once again a threat.

Why are they on the rise? As the NIH explains: "The antibiotic resistance crisis has been attributed to the overuse and misuse of these medications, as well as a lack of new drug development by the pharmaceutical industry due to reduced economic incentives and challenging regulatory requirements."

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2 million people are infected each year with antibiotic-resistant bacteria and about 23,000 people die from it, making this "superpower" the most dangerous one on the list.

Angela Nelson ( @bostonangela ) is an exhausted mom of two young daughters and two old cats, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning digital editor with more than 15 years of experience delivering news and information to audiences worldwide.

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7 species with 'superpowers' thanks to evolution and invasion - Mother Nature Network