It's tricky to make an exact copy of yourself. Or at least it is for cells undergoing mitosis, where cells replicate everything inside of them, including their neatly packaged DNA, then split in half. Rice University professor ...
Earth was mostly devoid of oxygen for much of its 4.5 billion year lifetime. That is, until certain processes started to allow for the eventual buildup of oxygen up to the levels we have now (around 21% of the atmosphere). ...
A University of Texas at Austin-led team has reconstructed the most detailed map to date of the molecular machines that carried out the functions of life in an ancient ancestor that gave rise to all complex life on Earth, ...
In evolutionary biology, all life on Earth is theoretically part of a single phylogenetic tree, indicating common ancestry. This model suggests that every living organism can be traced back to a distant common ancestor. However, ...
Stored in an open-air warehouse in tropical Darwin, Australia, are dozens of trays containing cylindrical cores of rock. They are from drill holes bored hundreds of meters below the surface by mineral exploration companies ...
In the crushing darkness of the hadal zone—deep ocean trenches plunging 6,000 m to nearly 11,000 m—scientists have uncovered a hidden community. A study published in Science on May 14 reports the discovery of a protist-dominated ...
From the highest mountains to the deepest ocean, the driest desert to the lushest jungle, Earth displays a dazzling array of life-forms. And eukaryotes account for many of these life-forms, including nearly all of the multicellular ...
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen have shown that giant viruses long thought to exist only as fleeting, free-living particles that can embed themselves permanently in the genome of a multicellular ...
Researchers from A*STAR Genome Institute of Singapore (A*STAR GIS) have developed a new method to study individual RNA molecules and reveal how their structures influence gene regulation, a fundamental process that affects ...
Biologists have long puzzled over why organisms with similar numbers of protein-coding genes can differ so dramatically in nervous system complexity. New research points to a potential link between the expanding diversity ...
