Discover the latest news, features and articles about the origin of the human species and what makes us different from our ...

DNA samples from one of the world’s largest and oldest plants — a quaking aspen tree (Populus tremuloides) in Utah called Pando — have helped researchers to determine its age and revealed clues about ...

Experiments reveal that unsaturated lipid membranes promote vesicle fusion and DNA retention during freeze–thaw cycles, highlighting icy environments as potential drivers of protocell evolution. Today ...

David Rand, a professor of natural history at Brown University, explains how studying mitochondria — the cell's energy producers — offers a useful way to understand complex gene-by-gene or ...

Modern humans descended from not one, but at least two ancestral populations that drifted apart and later reconnected, long before modern humans spread across the globe. Using advanced analysis based ...

Even a single gene, reshuffled or regulated in new ways, can fuel repeated bursts of evolutionary innovation, according to a recent study of wheatear birds. A study was recently published in the ...

Groundbreaking research shows that as men age, harmful genetic mutations in sperm become more common—not just from random chance, but because some are naturally favored. Advanced sequencing revealed ...

Scientists report adaptive divergence in cryptic color pattern is underlain by two distinct, complex chromosomal rearrangements, where millions of bases of DNA were flipped backwards and moved from ...

On the northern edge of Ukraine, inside the 30-km (19-mile) exclusion zone surrounding the abandoned Chornobyl (commonly known as Chernobyl) nuclear plant, thousands of animals now roam freely through ...

As a blue-eyed individual, and I’ve always wondered what makes them special. Growing up, people would comment on their color, ...