Biology

Neuroscientist Ishmail Abdus-Saboor discusses efforts to understand how skin contact can be painful or pleasurable, and what touch-obsessed naked mole rats might teach us about human social behavior.

New research is helping biologists understand how an overlooked aspect of coral physiology may affect their fate under climate change.

An organelle discovered inside a microbe inside a cow’s gut helps explain how livestock burps contribute to warming our planet.

Extremophiles that thrive in the most unforgiving environments aren’t just biological curiosities. Understanding their resilience has many implications for us.

The biologist’s bold “energetic view of life” looks to the body’s strangest organelles as the link between cells, health, and mind and the foundation of our experience of being alive.

An invisible difference in 10% of humans poses deep mysteries in several fields at once.

The idea of ‘biological agency’ — that life devises its own goals and behaves accordingly — complicates our understanding of what it means to be alive. But does it serve a scientific purpose?

Scientists built a synthetic cell that combines more lifelike properties than ever before — proof of concept that it’s possible to bring nonliving materials to life, or something close to it, in the lab.

The mechanical process of cell division exerts powerful, if microscopic, forces. How do the molecular machines that power it manage the strain?