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The Year in Biology
...prevailing wisdom and reveal a stronger, better intellectual framework. Both kinds of revolution unleash avalanches of new ideas and insights that improve our understanding of how life works. This past...
Cellular Self-Destruction May Be Ancient. But Why?
...membrane are all that remains. “It’s really amazing how fast, how organized it is,” said Aurora Nedelcu, an evolutionary biologist at the University of New Brunswick who has studied the...
Meet the Eukaryote, the First Cell to Get Organized
...lineages that lack mitochondria used to have them and then lost them sometime in evolutionary history.) And across the evolutionary tree, different eukaryotes have evolved or procured additional organelles that...
How Much Energy Does It Take To Think?
Studies of neural metabolism reveal our brain’s effort to keep us alive and the evolutionary constraints that sculpted our most complex organ. You’ve just gotten home from an exhausting day....
Break It To Make It: How Fracturing Sculpts Tissues and Organs
...hours of splitting, the cells sealed back together again. And these fractures were constructive, sculpting new shapes from developing tissues, in an evolutionary approach that scientists are uncovering across the...
An Early Step on the Long, Strange Road to Photosynthesis
An ancient lineage of cyanobacteria is helping biologists uncover an early evolutionary stage of the mind-boggling process that turns light into life. Every second, trillions of watts of solar energy...
A Map of Human History, Hidden in DNA
...His early exposure to human differences — “I loved geography, I loved languages, I loved history” — morphed into a deep curiosity about evolution and genetic diversity. His work reflects...
Beating the Odds for Lucky Mutations
...resistance to UV or antibiotics. The question that has tormented some evolutionary biologists ever since is whether nature favored this arrangement. Is the upsurge in mutations merely a secondary consequence...
World’s Simplest Animal Reveals Hidden Diversity
...thing because it has no real defined body,” said Michael Eitel, an evolutionary biologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany. “There’s no mouth, there’s no back, no nerve cells,...