A landmark Nature study reveals that non-coding DNA switches silenced 17 cartilage-building genes during human evolution, leaving human joints with 62% fewer shock-absorbing sugar molecules than ...

The scale also sorts crabs by which of four evolutionary routes they took onto land, since crabs arriving via freshwater ...

What if a battery could become more powerful as it ages? Much like wine developing a deeper flavor over time, researchers in ...

At some point in evolutionary history, whales and dolphins passed a threshold their bodies could never recover from. Scientists now know exactly what pushed them past it, and which ocean mammals are ...

Designing structural high-entropy alloys (SHEAs) means solving a problem with an enormous number of moving parts: which ...

A genomic study of 103 bat species suggests bats first evolved in Europe around 60 million years ago, reshaping scientific ...

Transparent fish possess remarkable adaptations that allow them to blend seamlessly into their aquatic surroundings, thereby evading predators. Their unique tissue structures and minimal pigmentation ...

In September 2018, China Daily ran a story that found its way to my desk. It featured the photograph of a beautifully preserved fossil skull with huge brow-ridges, with a caption speculating – wrongly ...

In fact, the overwhelming majority of animals have tails. Only a select few, like us humans, don’t have an external tail. But ...

Cascading risks involve an interconnected chain of events. A heat wave, for example, could contribute to a power failure, which could then disrupt water delivery because of increased electricity ...

A study in Science Advances links an ancient virus to a switched-off gene in chimpanzees that helps human brain cells mature ...

Most snakes slither away when threatened. But some have a much stranger escape strategy: they turn themselves into spinning wheels.