Evolution

Lineage tracing in mouse embryos supports a picture in which the brain grows from two separate founder cell populations rather than one, Rayyan T. Jokhai, Kyle M. Loh and colleagues at Stanford…

Spray a field of peppers and most of the green peach aphids under the leaves die. A few do not. They carry a small change in the protein the chemical was built to jam, so the dose passes over them.…

Imagine this: You are the CEO of a logistics company. You face the following challenge: to optimize delivery routes in real time, minimize infrastructure costs and respond instantly to the…

Sex is an expensive way to make a copy of yourself. A plant that reproduces sexually has to build flowers and make pollen, and then take apart the very combination of genes that carried it through…

In volcanic country on the deep seafloor, where fluid leaving the rock can be hotter than boiling water, a single-celled organism called Methanocaldococcus infernus does something almost nothing else…

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,…

A lump of fossilized dinosaur dung collected in eastern Montana in 2016 has turned out to be packed with feathers, and a University of Washington-led team reports that two of them have features…

A medieval grave with plague DNA in it is easy to date and hard to place. Radiocarbon will usually say the person died somewhere inside a window of a century or more, which is precise enough for…

Two companion papers published in Nature on Sept. 9, 2026, describe fossils, stone tools and animal bones from Bianfu Cave in Yunnan Province, southwestern China. The authors attribute the material…

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…

A fossil of Charnia, a frond-like organism that lived about 560 million years ago, has been found preserved in three dimensions in a sheep field in Finnmark, Arctic Norway. A team led by the…

Melon seeds are a problem on an archaeologist's table. They turn up at Chinese sites, small and flat and stubbornly anonymous: melons, cucumbers and their wild relatives all belong to the genus…