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Asked by aoifeeet to Ed, Katie, Sam, Steve, Vera on 21 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by amyh123.
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Vera Weisbecker answered on 20 Jun 2011:
Wow, good question and hard to summarize – not because it’s so much I’ve discovered but because it is hard to give the background on the discoveries.
So, I discovered a lot about the differences between marsupial and placental mammals – For example, that marsupials (kangaroos and koalas etc. ) tend to look similar to placentals (the rest) under similar selection pressure, although there are some shapes that marsupials just don’t seem to make it to (like, there are no winged/hooved marsupials). I also found out some unexpected results this “restriction” is reflected in the development of marsupials, who grow their skeleton in a totally different way from placentals.
The coolest thing I found out recently was that the mammalian brain can evolve to larger sizes simply by increased maternal care, nothing else. This means that as long as mammalian mothers can give their babies enough energy to grow a larger brain, the species as a whole can evolve these larger brains. Not all of my colleagues agree but I am pretty convinced :-)!
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Steven Daly answered on 20 Jun 2011:
This is a great question, and so far I can probably say ‘not much of use to mankind’. At the moment a lot of the research I am doing is building up to what we really want to do, which is to look at amino acids. These are important molecules in our bodies, but they tend to be big and floppy molecules, which makes them tough to study. So what I have done so far is confirm that the theory we use works for small simple molecules, and so hopefully that means it can be applied to amino acids soon.
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Katie Marriott answered on 20 Jun 2011:
I have made lots of little discoveries! I react different chemicals together and see what happens so I have made some exciting discoveries with things that do and don’t react.
The group I work in have also found some exciting discoveries about different chemicals you can get out of meteorites.
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Ed Morrison answered on 20 Jun 2011:
I have some discovered that there are differences in male and female facial movement, men prefer typically female facial movement, and women prefer men that move in a flirty way when they are at the fertile point of their menstrual cycles.
I was also part of a team that showed that people in juries seem to do better when you split them into subgroups rather than leaving them in a big group of 12.
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Sam Tazzyman answered on 21 Jun 2011:
I have discovered a few different things. The most recent thing I discovered was that females should choose which male they mate with in a different way depending on whether the benefit they get from a mating is fixed (all females who mate with that male get the same size benefit no matter how many females there are) or dilutable (the females get less benefit each if there are more of them). An example of a fixed benefit is if the females are choosing to mate with a certain male because he has good genes. Then all the females that mate with him get the same advantage no matter whether there is one or ten thousand of them. An example of a dilutable benefit is territory quality – if females choose a certain male because he has good territory, it might get less good if there are lots of other females there too.
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