Ancient enzymes show life’s nitrogen signal stayed unchanged for billions of years, helping scientists read early Earth.

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Imagine a photograph of your great-grandparents, grandparents and parents ...

"Consciousness," although challenging to define, can be thought of as a first-person awareness of one's surroundings and oneself. You sense the world through your eyes, nose, ears and hands, and track ...

In orbit above Earth, scientists are watching some of the strangest life forms in the universe rewrite the rules of evolution in real time. Viruses that prey on bacteria, along with the bacteria ...

Scientists have identified tubulin structures in primitive Asgard archea that may have been the precursor of our own cellular skeletons. In 2010, biologists made a shocking discovery. Living in the ...

Evolution doesn’t always move inextricably forward, instead sometimes taking the occasional detour or even getting stuck in never-ending circles. In Madison, Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota, bacteria evolves ...

In fact, why and how multicellular life evolved has long puzzled biologists. The first known instance of multicellularity was about 2.5 billion years ago, when marine cells (cyanobacteria) hooked up ...

New research shows that rainwater could have helped create a meshy wall around protocells 3.8 billion years ago, a critical step in the transition from tiny beads of RNA to every bacterium, plant, ...