Biology

To create a good living replica of the human brain, your best hope may be to let “organoid” components assemble it for you.

Species gain and shed startling amounts of DNA as they evolve, and even genomes that look stable churn furiously. What does it mean?

The mathematical concept of parity and the fatal flaw of serial multiplication can help explain why having two sexes usually works better than having one or three.

Take chemistry, add energy, get life. The first tests of Jeremy England’s provocative origin-of-life hypothesis are in, and they appear to show how order can arise from nothing.

Hydrodynamics and competition guide the architectural design of biofilm fortresses.

Mathematical insights into how RNA helps viruses pull together their protein shells could guide future studies of viral behavior and function.

Sex might help natural selection purge excessive mistakes from our genes.

New techniques expose unexpected diversity within seemingly uniform tissues.

Asexual reproduction can produce twice as many offspring as sexual reproduction without the hassle of finding and courting a mate. So why do most complex animals have two sexes? Why not three?