As a result, the evolutionary pressures that once favored the appendix have largely disappeared. Meanwhile, the medical risks of keeping the appendix – most notably appendicitis – remain. Modern ...

The story of life’s beginnings gets stranger when you look closely at viruses. These tiny entities seem to sit at the edge of biology. They carry genetic material, but they cannot make proteins on ...

Frances Arnold's game-changing technique of "directed evolution" creates enzymes with unusual capabilities. Her own evolution made it possible.

In Lake Malawi, hundreds of species of cichlid fish have evolved with astonishing speed, offering scientists a rare opportunity to study how biodiversity arises.

Researchers have created a method called optovolution that uses light to guide the evolution of proteins with dynamic behaviors. By engineering yeast cells so their survival depended on proteins ...

All complex biological systems—like the DNA, RNA and proteins constantly being copied and built within our cells—are prone to errors. That means as life evolved to be more elaborate, it also had to ...

A molecular biologist may have found a new 'rule of biology.' The rule challenges long-held notions that most living organisms prefer stability over instability because stability requires less energy ...

As our evolution slows and industrialization and technology accelerates, a growing body of research suggests that human biology is struggling to keep pace. Many of the chronic stress-related health ...

One hundred years ago, a small town in eastern Tennessee captured the attention of the entire country. A biology teacher in Dayton was accused of teaching human evolution to his students — which was ...

Reporters from across the United States flocked to eastern Tennessee in July 1925. In the small town of Dayton, biology teacher John Scopes went on trial for the crime of teaching human evolution.