How did the complexity of many organisms living today evolve from the simpler body plans of their ancestors? This is a central question in biology. Take our hands, for example: Every time we type a ...

Tiny grains of dust from asteroid Bennu are reshaping how scientists think life’s ingredients formed in space.

For life to develop on a planet, certain chemical elements are needed in sufficient quantities. Phosphorus and nitrogen are ...

One group of experts now say that looking for life on water and oxygen-rich planets could be a waste of time.

Scientists have discovered that DNA behaves in a surprising way when squeezed through tiny nanopores, overturning a long-held ...

What would happen to the genetic code, were it not to put together its twenty amino acids in the tidy, one-after-another ...

Among them was David Liu, a biochemist at the Broad Institute and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Liu isn’t a ...

T o make good decisions on any question the public needs to be well-informed, something not so easily accomplished in America’s schools. That is a key point made by Michael Kent, a recently retired ...

Gregor Mendel described his experiments with pea plants and proved that genes are transmitted in discrete units, with certain ...

Expediency with industrial development carries real environmental risks for salmon unless matched by corresponding investment ...

Why do some people live to 100 while their sibling dies decades earlier? Is it luck, lifestyle, or something written into their DNA? Relative to many other species, humans are particularly long-lived, ...

For almost two decades, scientists have debated whether sponges or comb jellies are the first animal lineage. Now some are ...