It seems counter-intuitive that in order to survive best as a species, not everything can live forever, but some cells in our bodies are fated to die, and a Mission Impossible-style auto-…

An interesting experiment published in Science placed baker's yeast ( Saccharomyces cerevisiae) in separate identical bioworlds. Then, at the same time, historical contingency events would happen,…

Parasitic bacteria were the first cousins of mitochondria, the energy factories in our cells – and first acted as energy parasites in those cells before becoming beneficial, according to a University…

What's not red and about the size of your thumb? Tomatoes, before ancient scientists set out to make them patabale.  This genomic history of tomato breeding, based on sequencing of 360 varieties…

A female neriid fly (right) laying eggs, while her mate fights off a rival male. Angela Crean and Russell Bonduriansky. Credit: Author provided By Angela Crean and Russell Bonduriansky Thanks to the…

The evolution of new traits with novel functions has long been studied by evolutionary biology and a new study of the color markings of cichlid fish has shed some new light on it. Swiss scientists…

In the past, researchers have primarily used the genetic history of mothers to understand evolution in animals, but a new study has investigated ancestry across the red fox genome, including the Y…

Sparkling Violetear.Image courtesy of Paul Martin By Katharine Gammon, Inside Science (Inside Science) – Most of the time, for an individual animal, the bigger you are, the more likely you are to…

I have just downloaded a paper featuring some research from the University of Durham and our own School of Biological Sciences here at Reading: Rapid Evolution of the Cerebellum in Humans and Other…

Heart racing and fists shaking, I stood ready to fight. I was moments away from sparring with the top student in my karate class in Japan: a fast, coordinated monster who had defeated all…