Yeast cells' ability to convert sugar into alcohol, essential for the production of beer and wine, can be attributed to a series of gene duplications that allow for optimal conversion of different…

The scientific method which provides us with so many technological goodies does not resemble the science of 1600. Ever since Bacon, science has undergone a slow evolution. Landmarks in the history of…

The Cyc knowledge base (KB) is a formalized representation of a vast quantity of fundamental human knowledge: facts, rules of thumb, and heuristics for reasoning about the objects and events of…

Since Darwin proposed universal common ancestry (UCA) More than 150 years ago, the theory, though well supported, has remained beyond the scope of formal testing. But the author of a new letter in…

Sometimes I feel like there is a hook in my chest. It rips me from my current location and pulls me through time and space to places deep within my imagination. The sensation is physical and real,…

In War of the Worlds, giant alien robots emerge out of the ground and begin vaporizing large numbers of actors. There’s a lot to like in those scenes, but there are three things I could not stand.…

Biologists studying a population of lizards on the Bahamas say that competition among the brown anole lizard (Anolis sagrei) is more important than predation by birds and snakes when it comes to…

After extracting ancient DNA from the 40,000-year-old bones of Neanderthals, scientists have obtained a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome. The effort revealed evidence that shortly after early…

Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have successfully altered the brain of one type of Cichlid fish to resemble that of another and discovered differences in the general patterning of…

A new study of island lizards suggests that geographical isolation may not be as important to evolution as previously thought. The new research, published in PLoS Genetics, shows that even those…