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 ...

It's not easy to look at a sea spider and see an animal so representative of its kind that it may help scientists sort out the evolution of almost everything with eight legs. But that's the potential ...

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 ...

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

Australian scientists have successfully developed a research system that uses 'biological artificial intelligence' to design and evolve molecules with new or improved functions directly in mammal ...

"Originating from contributions to a discussion meeting of the Royal Society of London." The evolutionary genetics of speciation / J.A. Coyne, H.A. Orr -- Genetic diversity: do marker genes tell us ...

The Indigenous peoples of the Bolivian highlands are survivors. For thousands of years they have lived at altitudes of more than two miles, where oxygen is about 35 percent lower than at sea level.

Following vocal criticism of an initial revision to Iowa’s science education standards that stripped away phrases like “climate change” and “biological evolution” from what K-12 students should learn, ...

In Part One of this series, we saw that culture doesn't suffer from the problem that Darwin's theory of natural selection successfully solved: the problem of how change accumulates in biological ...

Complex life began to develop earlier, and over a longer span of time, than previously believed, a new study has revealed. The research sheds new light on the conditions needed for early organisms to ...