Where did it start? How did it grow complex? Why did it get big? Three moments in Earth’s early history when evolution ...

Researchers at the University of Miami have identified a group of previously unknown viruses that bridge an evolutionary gap ...

Ocean acidification phytoplankton research published in Nature Geoscience shows that rising CO2 forces marine phytoplankton to shed phosphorus from their cell membranes in a process that 1,000 ...

Grasses include many economically important food crops and function as primary producers in diverse ecosystems. They also exhibit distinctive metabolic traits, such as the ability to synthesize starch ...

Inborn errors of metabolism are rare individually but quite common collectively, occurring in approximately 1 in 2000 births. 1 Each disorder arises from disease-causing genetic variants that disrupt ...

Early metabolism may have relied on a surprising partnership between primitive enzymes and metals supplied by hydrothermal environments. New research suggests bacteria and archaea later replaced many ...

The evolution of life is an incredibly improbable event, and as far as we know, it’s only happened once in our solar system—or so we thought. According to a new paper published in Science Advances ...

Scientists have reconstructed a possible sequence of events linking the chemistry of hydrothermal vents to the emergence of the first free-living cells—and their findings suggest that life may have ...

How and where did the first forms of life arise? These are the main questions driving research at the Institute of Molecular Evolution at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU). In a new ...

Biologists group animals with similar traits into broad categories called orders. Despite their similarities, animal species in the same order can have very different average lifespans. One of the ...

This article predates the current owners of Science Blog. It has not been reviewed under the current editorial process and is kept as part of the archive. Molybdenum is a hard, silvery metal most ...