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How Animals Color Themselves With Nanoscale Structures

June 16, 2021

Animals sculpt the optical properties of their tissues at the nanoscale to give themselves “structural colors.” New work is piecing together how they do it.

DNA Jumps Between Animal Species. No One Knows How Often.

June 9, 2021

The discovery of a gene shared by two unrelated species of fish is the latest evidence that horizontal gene transfers occur surprisingly often in vertebrates.

RNA Brakes May Stabilize a Cellular Symbiosis

June 2, 2021

In some symbiotic partnerships, an RNA-based mechanism may sabotage the growth of greedy hosts.

Radioactivity May Fuel Life Deep Underground and Inside Other Worlds

May 24, 2021

New work suggests that the radiolytic splitting of water supports giant subsurface ecosystems of life on Earth — and could do it elsewhere, too.

Sleep Evolved Before Brains. Hydras Are Living Proof.

May 18, 2021

Studies of sleep are usually neurological. But some of nature’s simplest animals suggest that sleep evolved for metabolic reasons, long before brains even existed.

Eve Marder on the Crucial Resilience of Neurons

May 17, 2021

Eve Marder’s research into the plasticity and resilience of nervous systems finds universal principles guiding life’s responses to stress.

Can Machines Control Our Brains?

May 17, 2021

Advances in brain-computer interface technology are impressive, but we’re not close to anything resembling mind control.

Scientists Catch Jumping Genes Rewiring Genomes

May 12, 2021

Transcription factors that act throughout the genome can arise from mashups of transposable elements inserted into established genes.

DNA’s Histone Spools Hint at How Complex Cells Evolved

May 10, 2021

New work shows that histones, long treated as boring spools for DNA, sit at the center of the origin story of eukaryotes and continue to play important roles in evolution and disease.

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