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PhysOrg

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  1. Sex is an expensive business, biologically speaking. Finding a suitable mate takes time and energy. Offspring are also a huge investment of resources. But sex does offer a rewarding possibility: children who are fitter than their parents thanks to new and "better" combinations of genes. Darwin realized that many animal species therefore carefully select their mates.

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  2. SEM and TEM observations of the feathers on an Early Cretaceous basal bird Eoconfuciusornis, from 130-million-year old lake deposits in Fengning, Hebei Province in northern China, present the earliest record of hollow melansomes from feathers. They are preserved as rods with air holes and roughly circular in cross section. "I am very surprised by this observation, if proven true, it would be a really exciting discovery," says Dr. Pan Yanhong, who led this study. 

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  3. An international team of researchers has found that extra-pair paternity in pied flycatchers leads to cooperation between males and females in feeding and fending off threats. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes experiments they conducted with wild pied flycatchers given boxes for nesting and what they learned from them.

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  4. Antarctica has been relatively isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years but these days ships could potentially introduce marine animals and seaweeds. Invasive species can have drastic consequences for ecosystems, for example by taking over areas and creating a new habitat or becoming predators for species with no suitable defenses.

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