If you are an organic farmer, you may be worried your crops can be "contaminated" by a field genetically modified with a gene to express a natural toxin against pests. Nasty weeds sometimes…

Though we share superficial physical similarities, the cognitive differences between humans and our closest living cousins, the chimpanzees, are obvious - we metaphorically throw feces at each other…

Sorry Australia, you can no longer lay claim to the origins of the iconic New Zealand kiwi - the kiwi's closest relative is not the emu.  Instead, the diminutive kiwi is most closely related to…

Whether an insect will have a male or female offspring depends on the weather and temperature, according to a study led by Joffrey Moiroux and Jacques Brodeur of the University of Montreal's…

In Lewis Carroll's 1871 classic novel Through the Looking Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice: "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." Over the years,…

An international team has discovered what happens on a molecular basis to insects that evolved resistance to genetically modified cotton plants.  Their findings shed light on how the global…

Most dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago but one dinosaur lineage survived and lives on today – we call these the birds and they rule the skies the way they once ruled land.  An…

Take a muscle cell, modify it over millions of years, and you can end up with a shocking evolutionary result: the electric fish. Electric fish have evolved several times in varying levels of…

A new report in Molecular Systems Biology speculates about how primitive cells learned to synthesize their organic components – the molecules that form RNA, lipids and amino acids. The paper also…

Man or woman? Male or female? Modern sociological woo about gender aside, in humans and other mammals, the difference between the sexes depends on one single element of the genome: the Y…