Your gut isn't home to a few hundred bacterial species living peacefully side by side, it's more like a sprawling city where, within a single species, different "neighborhoods" of bacteria have quietly evolved to specialize in very different lifestyles. A... Continue Reading →
Insects are, by most measures, an excellent food. They pack in protein, need a fraction of the land and water that livestock does, and over 1,600 species are already recognized as edible somewhere on Earth. Hundreds of millions of people... Continue Reading →
A new evolutionary review argues that the vertebrate retina — and even the brain's pineal gland — trace back to a single median eye on a tiny, cyclops-like ancestor nearly 600 million years ago.
How bacteria live -- whether as independent cells or in a communal biofilm -- determines how they evolve antibiotic resistance, which could lead to more personalized approaches to antimicrobial therapy and infection control. University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers... Continue Reading →
Can your liver sense when you're staring at a television screen or cellphone late at night? Apparently so, and when such activity is detected, the organ can throw your circadian rhythms out of whack, leaving you more susceptible to health... Continue Reading →
African mole-rats are insensitive to many different kinds of pain. As an international research team led by the MDC's Gary Lewin reports in Science, this characteristic has even allowed mole-rats to populate new habitats. Thanks to a genetic change, the highveld... Continue Reading →
What’s the difference between physics and biology? Take a golf ball and a cannonball and drop them off the Tower of Pisa. The laws of physics allow you to predict their trajectories pretty much as accurately as you could wish... Continue Reading →