Contrary to common belief, evolution sometimes produces organisms that are less fit than their distant ancestors.
A new genomic study of how the three orders of amphibians evolved and diverged over millions of years, provides an updated view of amphibian evolutionary discordances, and of the differing explanations of amphibian relationships.
The physiology of baleen whales is not well understood, but a new research project is changing what marine biologists know about the health and environmental stress of these large aquatic animals.
Scientists have identified how the giant unicellular slime mold, Physarum polycephalum, uses its own body network to encode the position of a food source for future use.
The discovery of terrestrial fungus-like fossils dating back to the end of the Cryogenian ice ages 635 million years ago can provide clues as to how the frozen Earth was able to return to normal and allow life to develop.
For an embryo to develop, new cells of different types must know precisely where to place themselves and in what direction to grow. How the cells are able to do this has been an unexplained question for more than a century.
Geoscientists have condensed 1 billion years of Earth's tectonic plate movements into a 40-second video.
Carbon-14 dating of fossil bones is an important tool for a variety of scientific disciplines, yet its inaccuracy is called "the elephant in the room" by an ecologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia.
A significant indirect effect of the COVID-19 pandemic was a sudden and sharp decrease in the number of cardiology diagnostic procedures performed worldwide, and especially in lower-income countries.
The risk of developing cancer usually increases with body size and lifespan in mammals, but elephants and some other animals are an exception.
A snapshot of the results of Israel's national vaccination campaign indicates that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has dramatically reduced the number of cases of COVID-19, the number of hospitalizations and the number of critically ill patients.
Researchers have found a way to alter human calcitonin into a safe and effective drug for the treatment of osteoporosis and other bone diseases.
How three groups of spitting cobras in different parts of the world independently developed a pain-inducing venom to hurt and blind their predators is an interesting study of convergent evolution.
What drove the explosion of diversity in an East African cichlid freshwater fish that radiated into more than 2,000 species in the last few million years?
A clinical trial of a drug that targets the interleukin 17 family of cytokines could lead to a preventive treatment for acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) in COVID-19.
European eels have long fascinated biologists because of their complex life cycle and diverse habitats, ranging from above the polar circle to North Africa in the south, the Azores in the west to the Black Sea in the east.
A research team from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel reviews the different types of antibody tests for COVID-19, and their importance, in a January 2021 preprint of Cell Reports Medicine.
Utilizing X-ray imaging techniques, researchers at Penn State, MIT and cooperating institutions recently made a breakthrough in understanding the synthesis of thiostrepton, a powerful antibiotic with the potential to target even specific breast cancer cells.
When bacteria reproduce their chromosome pairs and the DNA contained within them must separate and then faithfully reproduce copies of themselves.
A conceptual framework for examining the role of novelty and innovation in evolution--and their differences--is the subject of a comprehensive article in the journal Biological Reviews, published Aug. 31, 2020.