When the Kinks' Ray Davies penned the tune 'Last of the Steam-Powered Trains,' the vanishing locomotives stood as nostalgic symbols of a simpler English life. But for a paleontologist, the replacement ...

We have only one example of biology forming in the universe – life on Earth. But what if life can form in other ways? How do you look for alien life when you don’t know what alien life might look like ...

Although we humans have changed our environment in many ways during the past few thousand years, we are still changed by ...

Evolution, Vol. 72, No. 5 (MAY 2018), pp. 1050-1062 (13 pages) Variation in rates of molecular evolution (heterotachy) is a common phenomenon among plants. Although multiple theoretical models have ...

Australian scientists have developed a groundbreaking approach that harnesses artificial biological intelligence to rapidly evolve molecules with improved functions directly within mammal cells. This ...

From sunflowers to starfish, symmetry appears everywhere in biology. This isn't just true for body plans—the molecular machines keeping our cells alive are also strikingly symmetric. But why? Does ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was discussing the possibility of intelligent alien life with his colleagues. If alien ...

The neocortex is the part of the brain that enables us to speak, dream, or think. The underlying mechanism that led to the expansion of this brain region during evolution, however, is not yet ...

It was the world’s first murder. The ape-man exultantly threw his club (actually the leg bone of a zebra) into the air, and, as it spun, it morphed into an orbiting space station. In this stunning ...

This post is in response to How Culture Makes Us Smarter By Steve Stewart-Williams Ph.D. Are we big-brained mammals who have out-evolved ourselves? 'The evidence for the hypothesis that cultural ...