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Mammals and birds generate their own body heat and control their body temperature. Mammals and birds generate their own body heat and control their body temperature. This process is known as endothermic, or warm-blooded, and may be one reason why mammals tend to dominate nearly every global ecosystem. Warm blooded animals are more active both day and night than cold blooded animals and they reproduce more quickly. However, until now it is not known exactly when endotherms came from the ancestors of mammals. Our new study, just published in Nature, changes that. A combination of scientific intuition, fossils from the Karoo region of South Africa and cutting-edge technology has provided the answer: endothermy developed in the ancestors of mammals about 233 million years ago during the Late Triassic period. The origin of mammalian endothermy has been one of the great unsolved mysteries of paleontology. Ma

Poisonous nut tree Strychnos nux-vomica. Credit: Danny Kessler, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology Researchers from Jena show how poisonous nut trees form strychnine. A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena revealed a complete biosynthetic pathway for strychnine formation in plant species. Strychnos nux-vomica (poison nut). After identifying all the genes involved in the biosynthesis of strychnine and other metabolites, the researchers expressed them in a plant model. Nicotiana benthamiana . This suggests that this highly complex and pharmacologically important molecule can be synthesized using “metabolic engineering” methods. Strychnine is something that many people know from crime reports, novels, or movies. For example, Agatha Christie had several of her victims die from strychnine poisoning. In his first novel “The Mysterious Affair at Style,” he described what is perhaps the most famous fictional murder case involving a highly t