Biology

The visual systems of an obscure group of mollusks provide a rare natural example of path-dependent evolution, in which a critical fork in the creatures’ past determined their evolutionary futures.

The pathbreaking geneticist Cassandra Extavour pursues the secrets of multicellular life while balancing careers in both science and singing.

If evolution favors the survival of the fittest, where did the impulse to help others come from? Host Janna Levin speaks with Stephanie Preston, a neuropsychologist who studies the biology of altruism.

Highly repetitive regions of junk DNA may be the key to a newly discovered mechanism for gene regulation.

When your mind is wandering, your brain’s “default mode” network is active. Its discovery 20 years ago inspired a raft of research into networks of brain regions and how they interact with each other.

A mutant seedling revealed how plant tissues scatter incoming light, allowing plants to sense its direction and move toward it.

The Joy of Why podcast returns for a third season, with two co-hosts, 24 brilliant guests and 24 all-new episodes.

The cerebellum is responsible for far more than coordinating movement. New techniques reveal that it is, in fact, a hub of sensory and emotional processing in the brain.

Microbiologists are searching for a universal theory of how bacteria form communities based not on their species but on the roles they play.