Evolution

Two slabs of rock, one from southern China and one from southern Mongolia, look much the same under a microscope. Both are crowded with the preserved shapes of tiny organisms. In neither can anyone…

The MitoCarta Tree of Life Consortium has compared the proteins found inside mitochondria, the compartments that supply most of a cell's energy, in eight organisms drawn from across the tree of life.…

A fossil named in 1990 as the earliest known reptile is not a reptile at all. Writing in Nature on September 30, 2026, Ben Igielman of the University of Oxford, Roger Benson of the American Museum of…

Researchers have filmed living Asgard archaea, single-celled microbes without a nucleus that are considered the closest known relatives of complex cells, crawling across a glass surface. The work was…

Researchers at the Kunming Institute of Zoology, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, report that a gene called CCNB1IP1 switched on in the primate brain and grew steadily more active as the…

Touch the tentacle of a sea anemone and something explosive happens at a scale too small to see. Inside a stinging cell, a coiled thread fires outward, turns itself inside out, and harpoons whatever…

More than a decade after it was found, an antibody called CR9114 is still the only one known to block both influenza A and influenza B. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign say…

Researchers modeled the shapes of two odor-detecting proteins from the antennae of a moth whose mating chemistry nobody had studied, predicted the molecule those proteins pick up, and then confirmed…

Researchers at Northern Arizona University and the University of Bristol have proposed a way to estimate how far life could have evolved on a distant planet without observing any life there. Their…

A study published Sept. 21, 2026, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that evolution does not prevent the black-browed albatross from declining under projected climate…

Great tits arriving from outside a population, rather than natural selection acting on the birds already there, explain when that population's genetics shifted and when it held still. Simon Evans and…

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, including Nobel laureate Jennifer A. Doudna, report the discovery of a family of RNA-guided systems that they place ancestral to the earliest…