A giant DNA virus pulled from a Japanese freshwater pond is forcing scientists to rethink how complex cells first acquired their defining feature: the nucleus. Named ushikuvirus, the newly ...

The story of life’s beginnings gets stranger when you look closely at viruses. These tiny entities seem to sit at the edge of ...

Scientists developed Evo 2, a large biological foundation model trained on about 9 trillion DNA base pairs that can analyse ...

Late in 2025, we covered the development of an AI system called Evo that was trained on massive numbers of bacterial genomes. So many that, when prompted with sequences from a cluster of related genes ...

The most widely accepted scientific explanation for the arrival of all complex life on Earth has had an unsolved mystery at its heart. According to the theory, all plants, animals and fungi, known ...

In the oceans and on land, scientists are discovering rare, transitional organisms that bridge the gap between Earth’s simplest cells and today’s complex ones. By Carl Zimmer A flurry of new studies ...

In many submerged regions, murky mud shelters strange life-forms that seem to be the key to one of the biggest mysteries of life on Earth. These creatures belong to a domain of life called the archaea ...

Cells are the basic building blocks of life—the smallest units that can do all the jobs a living thing needs. Most cells fit into two groups: prokaryotes and eukaryotes. The most significant ...

Mysterious microbes living in wetlands in China have helped to narrow down when the ancestor of all animals and plants lived – and the oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere may have played a key role in ...

An international collaboration between four senior scientists from Mainz, Valencia, Madrid, and Zurich has published groundbreaking research in the journal PNAS, shedding light on the most significant ...

Sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) provides valuable insights into past ecosystems, yet its functional diversity has remained unexplored due to potential limitations in gene annotation for short-read ...