Earth has remained continuously habitable for billions of years partly due to luck, according to computer simulations of climate evolution for 100,000 randomly generated planets.
Discovery of the first fully preserved three-dimensional fossils of tiny animals 547 million years old is helping scientists understand the evolutionary link between the Ediacaran Period and the beginning of the Cambrian, 541 million years ago.
Scientists know a lot about how rats navigate their social environment, but not much about the process of human spatial navigation.
An international group of biomedical researchers has developed a method of mining genetic information from multiple electronic medical records without compromising patient privacy.
A new study has determined how two distinct orders of the animal kingdom, the extinct Tasmanian tiger and the gray wolf, developed nearly identical skull shapes, a unique example of convergent evolution, the independent development of similar features in non-related animals or plants.
A research team at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, has come up with some new answers to the question of how life evolved on Earth.
The oldest known python fossils, recently discovered in Germany, challenge current theories about early snake evolution.
Finding, identifying and cataloguing 13,000 dinosaur bones deposited in a single bonebed in Wyoming requires a detective team.
A new recycling method may reduce enormous amounts of waste from the annual 100 million tons of multilayer plastic produced worldwide.
An international team of researchers has identified several genetic variants in critically ill COVID-19 patients that are potential targets for new therapies or repurposing of existing drugs.
A team of mathematical researchers has created a model for estimating which preventive measures work best to minimize the spread of COVID-19 at different types of events.
Using single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer (smFRET), researchers have come closer to understanding the mechanics of DNA bending on a genome-wide scale.
A new iPhone app developed by researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in Long Island, New York, enables scientists and others to access a hand-held mobile genetics laboratory in the field.
A team of researchers from Texas A&M University has discovered a hidden gene, embedded within another gene, in the group of bacteriophages called leviviruses. They report that the hidden gene is rapidly evolving and thus holds the potential for understanding and preventing antibiotic resistance.
Finding a way to preserve antibiotic effectiveness and simultaneously prevent antibiotic resistance can help stop the spread of infectious diseases, especially in hospital settings. Many important antibiotics, however, no longer work against certain bacterial infections because bacteria have developed mutations to make them antibiotic resistant.
DNA is the code of life. In order to better understand life, scientists are seeking an explanation for its beginnings.
Mathematician Peter Shor — creator of the revolutionary method for making quantum computers possible — now warns that quantum computing threatens to crack the encryption coding used by conventional computers.
An artificial intelligence (AI) program has successfully cracked a 50-year problem in biology: How to accurately determine the three-dimensional structure of protein folding from the protein's amino acid sequence.
The platypus just became known for another unusual characteristic: It is biofluorescent.
A special issue of the Journal of Proteome Research celebrates the 90% completion of the human proteome, a catalog of all the proteins encoded by the human genome.