Biology

To recognize strange extraterrestrial life and solve biological mysteries on this planet, scientists are searching for an objective definition for life’s basic units.

The heartbeat and other bodily processes play a surprising role in shaping perception and cognition.

Herd immunity differs from place to place, and many factors influence how it’s calculated.

Cosmic rays may have given right-handed genetic helixes an evolutionary edge at the beginning of life’s history.

Many theories have been offered for why the official COVID-19 toll on the Indian subcontinent has been surprisingly low. The best explanation may be the shortage of good, timely data.

The nervous systems of foraging and predatory animals may prompt them to move along a special kind of random path called a Lévy walk to find food efficiently when no clues are available.

To explain why men are on average taller than women, scientists theorized about competition for mates. But the effects of estrogen on bone growth may be answer enough.

Going without sleep for too long kills animals but scientists haven’t known why. Newly published work suggests that the answer lies in an unexpected part of the body.

Neural networks have been taught to quickly read the surfaces of proteins — molecules critical to many biological processes.