Biology

A five-year “adversarial collaboration” of consciousness theorists led to a stagy showdown in front of an audience. It crowned no winners — but it can still claim progress.

Why did mammals, grasses and some other groups of organisms explode in diversity only after millions of years? The evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner plumbs the secrets of those “sleeping beauties.”

By watching “minimal” cells regain the fitness they lost, researchers are testing whether a genome can be too simple to evolve.

Genetic elements called Mavericks that have some viral features could be responsible for the large-scale smuggling of DNA between species.

For over a century, biologists have had to contend with a complicated picture of genetics, which they’ve only recently begun to understand.

The reshuffling of neurons during fruit fly metamorphosis suggests that larval memories don’t persist in adults.

In some deep subterranean aquifers, cells have a chemical trick for making oxygen that could sustain whole underground ecosystems.

Abnormal waves of electrical activity can cause a heart’s muscle cells to beat out of sync. In this episode, Flavio Fenton, an expert in cardiac dynamics, talks with Steve Strogatz about ways to treat heart arrhythmias without resorting to painful defibrillators.

Extreme microorganisms carpeting the Atacama Desert in Chile illuminate how life might have first taken hold on Earth’s surface.