Deep in the forests of southwestern China, scientists have discovered a fungus that looks as extraordinary as its name suggests. Dianjunus rex, nicknamed “D-Rex,” produces pale, upright structures that can reach 50 centimetres in height and weigh as much as 2.2 kilograms. But its remarkable size is only part of …
All known cellular life on Earth uses DNA to store its genetic instructions. From microscopic bacteria to humans, DNA carries the information needed for growth, reproduction and cellular function. But could life exist without this molecule? Surprisingly, scientists have discovered biological systems that use RNA instead of DNA and are …
Antibiotic resistance is a pressing global health problem, and some of the most promising leads may come from a surprising source: extinct animals. Rebuilding a 160-million-year-old defense Biologists at the University of Oregon have resurrected antimicrobial peptides, short protein fragments, from the ancestors of placental mammals. These ancestors date back …
A tsunami can destroy coastlines, reshape rivers and create entirely new habitats. But in Japan, the 2011 disaster also triggered something much less visible: two fish species that normally lived apart suddenly began exchanging genes. The surprising part came years later. Researchers tracking the fish found that although the tsunami-triggered …
There’s a common piece of advice floating around: “get a master’s, it’ll pay off.” There’s also an equally common counter-narrative: “grad school is a debt trap.” Both are true, just not for the same degree, the same field, or the same person. If you’re weighing whether to go back to …
Plants, animals, fungi and humans all belong to one enormous branch of life: eukaryotes. Our cells contain nuclei, mitochondria and intricate internal structures that allow them to perform vastly more complex functions than typical bacteria. But where did this complexity come from? Scientists are increasingly looking toward a strange group …
Long before beer, before farming, before anyone planted a single seed on purpose, someone in an Ice Age cave on the island of Sulawesi tucked a hard little nut into their cheek and kept doing it, on and off, for years. That small, repeated habit just rewrote the timeline of …
For over a century, we’ve known T. rex from its bones, featuring skulls in glass cases, femurs the size of tree trunks, teeth like railroad spikes. What we’ve never had is a clear record of the animal actually moving. Bones tell you what an animal was built like. Footprints tell …
For centuries, scientists have classified species primarily by what they could see: body shape, colour, skeletons, shells and other physical characteristics. But what if some species were hiding in plain sight not because they looked identical, but because nobody had their genetic information? Today, old DNA is giving scientists a …
A global team of 30 researchers argues that a whole new science has been growing quietly in the greenhouse, and that nobody has bothered to give it a name badge. For decades, the glamour in biology has belonged to the gene. Sequence the DNA, find the gene, fix the crop. …
Evolution is often described as a process driven by random mutations and natural selection. If mutations arise by chance, does that mean the future of life is completely unpredictable? Surprisingly, scientists are discovering that evolution may be more predictable than we once thought but only to a point. The key …
A fruit fly’s brain is smaller than a poppy seed. Yet inside that tiny space are more than 100,000 neurons connected by millions of tiny links. Now, scientists have mapped every one of them. They have created the first complete wiring diagram, or connectome, of an adult male Drosophila melanogaster …
The human genome contains billions of DNA letters, but simply knowing the sequence is not enough to understand how our cells work. The crucial question is also how cells know which genes to turn on, when to activate them, and how strongly to express them. Scientists have now taken an …
A strawberry can be recognised by its colour before it is even tasted. That familiar red isn’t simply a cosmetic feature. It is the visible result of thousands of biochemical reactions taking place inside the developing fruit. Now, scientists have managed to interrupt that process with a single, precisely targeted …
What if part of your DNA came from an ancient human relative that scientists have never actually found? It sounds like science fiction, but researchers are discovering that the human genome contains traces of “ghost” populations extinct human lineages that left genetic footprints in our ancestors even though no confirmed …
“Nature is constantly communicating with us, but its primary language is written in rays of light.” When pioneering botanist Luther Burbank uttered these words, he was speaking not of poetic abstraction, but of a fundamental biological reality. To human proteins, a beam of sunlight is merely warmth or illumination. To …
For decades, biology textbooks have presented the genetic code as one of life’s most fundamental rules. Three-letter sequences of DNA and RNA, called codons, tell cells which amino acids to add when making proteins. Three codons UAA, UAG, and UGA are traditionally known as stop codons, signalling the cellular machinery …
Space may look empty and peaceful from Earth, but for the human body, it is an extreme environment. Astronauts face microgravity, isolation, disrupted sleep, and perhaps most importantly, higher exposure to space radiation. Scientists have therefore been asking a fascinating question: What happens to our DNA when we leave Earth? …
Losing an arm and watching it grow back over the next few months, complete with bones, muscles, nerves, blood vessels, and skin, sounds like science fiction for humans. For salamanders, it is simply part of life. Their bodies seem to carry a biological repair manual that humans have largely lost. …
A skeleton may look like a silent frame of bones, but it is much more than that. It is like an old diary whose pages never fade, patiently waiting for someone to read its story. Even when a person has been gone for hundreds or thousands of years, the bones …
Stand a tiny Chihuahua beside a towering Great Dane, and it feels almost impossible to believe they belong to the same species. One fits comfortably in your lap, while the other could rest its head on your dining table. Yet both share a common ancestor-the gray wolf. For years, scientists …
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