New research indicates that domestic horses originated in the steppes of modern-day Ukraine, southwest Russia and west Kazakhstan, mixing with local wild stocks as they spread throughout Europe and Asia.
When you buy a racehorse, you pays your money and you takes your chances. Top yearlings at Keeneland’s 2011 Thoroughbred auction, for instance, averaged nearly $350,000 and hadn’t yet raced a step. Odds are that some of them never will. Now, thanks to a biologist, it’s possible to boost the odds of getting a winner with a simple genetic test.
Chronic inflammatory small bowel disease has an increased prevalence in sport horses. The disorder is associated with intermittent colic, weight loss, poor performance and anemia. Chronic inflammatory small bowel disease seems to have a predominance in dressage horses, but its exact cause is unknown to date.
A new study describes how bacteria use a previously unknown means to defeat an antibiotic. The researchers found that the bacteria have modified a common "housekeeping" enzyme in a way that enables the enzyme to recognize and disarm the antibiotic.
As scientists continue developing climate change projection models, paleontologists studying an extreme short-term global warming event have discovered direct evidence about how mammals respond to rising temperatures. Researchers have now found a correlation between temperature and body size in mammals by following the evolution of the earliest horses about 56 million years ago: As temperatures increased, their body size decreased.
Some 56 million years ago, rising temps and concentrations of carbon dioxide caused mammals, including tiny Sifrhippus, to shrink. New research offers new evidence of why and how it happened and provides clues to what might happen to animals in the future from global warming.
