Biology

Researchers at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge and the University of Bern report that cells keep watch over glycogen, the body's short-term store of sugar, and destroy the faulty…

A team at the Weizmann Institute of Science has counted the protein variants that sit in healthy human tissue alongside the standard version of the same protein: 13,910 of them across 29 tissues,…

Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus have recorded the activity of nearly every cell in a week-old zebrafish larva at once, on a timescale of seconds. The work…

You took a few thousand steps today, and almost every one of them started the same way. The back of the heel touched down first, slightly ahead of the rest of the foot, and the load rolled forward…

Warm water pushes the ricefield eel from female to male through a single temperature-sensitive protein in the ovary, researchers report in eLife. The paper, published on September 7 by Zhi Yang,…

Archaea that live inside marine sponges have long been classed as strict ammonia-eaters, microbes whose sole job is stripping nitrogen waste from their host. A study published Sept. 4 in Science…

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have sequenced nuclear paleogenomes from two fossils of Miracinonyx trumani (the extinct animal long called the American cheetah) and found it…

Chimpanzees at two African sites can be told apart by the sound of their laughs, grunts and whimpers, and the difference is sharper in juveniles than in infants, researchers report in PLOS One.…

A team co-led by the University of Cambridge and HHMI's Janelia Research Campus has published a complete wiring map of a male fruit fly's central nervous system on Sept. 3 in Cell, covering the brain…

A ribosome spends most of its working life waiting. The machine that builds every protein in every living cell cannot start until a messenger RNA happens to drift into it and thread through the right…

Ninety percent of the Arthrobacter bacterial strains found in Antarctic soils occur nowhere else on Earth, according to a study published on August 31 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of…

Crack a snake egg partway through incubation and you find an animal that does not fit the space it is in. The embryo is already a long ribbon of vertebrae and muscle, stowed inside the shell wound…