Background Investigations of evolution knowledge and acceptance and their relation are central to evolution education research. Ambiguous results in this field of study demonstrate a variety of measuring issues, for instance differently theorized constructs, or a lack of standardized methods, especially for cross-country comparisons. In particular, meaningful comparisons across European countries, with their varying cultural backgrounds and education systems, are rare, often include only few countries, and lack standardization. To address these deficits, we conducted a standardized European survey, on 9200 first-year university students in 26 European countries utilizing a validated, comprehensive questionnaire, the “Evolution Education Questionnaire”, to assess evolution acceptance and knowledge, as well as influencing factors on evolution acceptance. Results We found that, despite European countries’ different cultural backgrounds and education systems, European first-year university students generally accept evolution. At the same time, they lack substantial knowledge about it, even if they are enrolled in a biology-related study program. Additionally, we developed a multilevel-model that determines religious faith as the main influencing factor in accepting evolution. According to our model, knowledge about evolution and interest in biological topics also increase acceptance of evolution, but to a much lesser extent than religious faith. The effect of age and sex, as well as the country’s affiliation, students’ denomination, and whether or not a student is enrolled in a biology-related university program, is negligible. Conclusions Our findings indicate that, despite all their differences, most of the European education systems for upper secondary education lead to acceptance of evolution at least in university students. It appears that, at least in this sample, the differences in knowledge between countries reflect neither the extent to which school curricula cover evolutionary biology nor the percentage of biology-related students in the country samples. Future studies should investigate the role of different European school curricula, identify particularly problematic or underrepresented evolutionary concepts in biology education, and analyze the role of religious faith when teaching evolution.

Sexual selection plays an important role in species evolution and speciation, and is fundamental to understanding of biological evolution. In the last decades, research on sexual selection helped understand its causes and impacts in species evolution, sexual dimorphism, and speciation. It also provided interesting examples that can be used to engage students in learning about evolution. Here we review the latest sexual selection research and propose two activities that model evolution by sexual selection. The engaging nature of these activities makes them useful to promote active learning about evolution, the nature of science, and methods used to construct scientific knowledge. Importantly, we address several performance expectations suggested by the Next Generation Science Standards.

A survey to evaluate the occurrence of air-borne fungal spores in two different food industries, dairies and bakeries, was conducted. Our data revealed considerable fungal pollution in the environments of both industries, as well as some differences in the distribution of the genera of fungi recovered. Noteworthy was the frequent finding of numerous fungi frequently responsible for allergic rhinitis, asthma and other diseases, or well-known for their production of mycotoxins in foods or characterized by their degradative activity against various substances. Aspergillus, Candida, Fusarium, Geotrichum, Mucor and Penicillium were the most common genera identified in dairies while Alternaria, Aspergillus, Botrytis, Candida, Cladosporium, Penicillium and Saccharomyces occurred more frequently in bakeries. The survey showed that fungi can play a significant role in allergic and non-allergic diseases in modern working environments.

We isolated one trinucleotide and seven tetranucleotide microsatellite loci for the Eurasian woodcock ( Scolopax rusticola ). We describe polymerase chain reaction conditions and primers for the successful amplification of these loci and report the results obtained from their use in 42 specimens from two populations in Europe. The number of alleles per locus ranged from three to 15, observed heterozygosity was comprised between 0.11 and 1.00 and expected heterozygosity ranged between 0.10 and 0.91. Cross-specific amplification experiments highlighted the potential usefulness of these molecular markers for the study of three related scolopacid waders.