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How Do Fungi Keep the Planet Healthy?
Evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers explains how fungal networks in soil trade nutrients with plants, help keep carbon underground, and strike bargains without having a brain.
How Does Life Unfold? A Landscape Metaphor Comes Into Its Own.
C.H. Waddington’s powerful image of embryonic stem cells specializing on a rolling landscape has captivated biologists since the 1950s. Experimental data is finally confirming, and complicating, his visionary ideas.
Surprisingly Complex Waves Reveal the Brain’s Inner Workings
Unexpected patterns traveling across the human brain may be reorganizing its activity in real time.
How Virus-like ‘Jumping Genes’ Became Our Partners in Evolution
Half of our genome is made of transposons — snips of DNA that can move and copy themselves. But they’re more than parasites or genetic junk.
Ctenophores Aren’t Just Beautiful. They’re Biological Wonders.
Comb jellies are helping answer fundamental questions in biology, from how the earliest nervous systems evolved to how bioluminescence works.
Why Do These Fossil Shells Flip Their Spirals Every Few Millennia?
The mystery of the flipping foraminifera may conceal a rarely observed evolutionary process playing out across the planet.
Genome Duplication Is a Radical Evolutionary Gamble
By doubling their entire genome, organisms can evolve extremely rapidly — or they can lose it all. New studies reveal how to survive the high-risk, high-reward evolutionary event.
A New Framework for How the Brain Compresses Our Noisy World
An updated view of categorization reflects the modern understanding that the nervous system is more of a prediction engine than a filing cabinet.
Why Aging May Be a Program, Not a Breakdown
By deciphering the molecular signatures of millions of mouse cells, Junyue Cao has found that aging is not haphazard wear and tear but rather a “remodeling of the cell society.”