Biology(Page 2)

Latest in Biology

A viral Twitter video claims to illustrate how motor proteins move. It's fun, but incorrect — and what those molecules actually do is way cooler.

The Real Story Behind That Viral Clip of a Protein With a Confident Strut

By Maggie Harrison Dupré

A ship passed through a "milky sea" deep-water bioluminescence event in 2019. A new study about bioluminescence details the glowing ocean and biology.

Sailors Say the Ocean Around Their Ship Started to Glow

By Lonnie Lee Hood

Australian scientists got a fascinating surprise whenthey discovered what appears to be the world's largest organism, living under the ocean.

Scientists Discover World’s Largest Organism, Chilling Out Under Ocean

By Maggie Harrison Dupré

Scientists have created synthetic organisms known as "Xenobots" that can self-replicate — a striking leap forward in synthetic biology.

Scientists Create Synthetic Organisms That Can Reproduce

Scientists injected photosynthetic algae into a tadpole that supplied the animal's brain with so much oxygen it could live without breathing.

Scientists Create Creature That Doesn’t Need to Breathe

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists watching octopuses interact with each other found that they "throw" shells and dirt at each other, including a female rejecting an amorous male.

Scientists: Octopuses Love to Fling Objects at Each Other

By Dan Robitzski

Is blockchain tech alive? No, but scientists argue it may as well be if we adjusted our definition of what represents life.

Scientists Say Blockchains “Fit Some Definitions of Life”

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists found and woke up a microscopic creature that froze and went dormant in Siberian permafrost about 24,000 years ago.

Scientists Resurrect Creature That’s Been Frozen for 24,000 Years

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists found a key difference in how human and mosquito DNA organizes into chromosomes then figured out how to morph them back and forth.

Scientists Morph Human DNA Into Mosquito DNA Structure

By Dan Robitzski

Female Indian jumping ants vying for a seat on a vacant throne actually shrink their own brains to become queenlike mating "gamergate" ants.

This Type of Ant Can Shrink and Regrow Its Brain

By Dan Robitzski

MIT scientists converted the structure and construction of spider webs into odd music which they hope could lead to a form of human-spider communications.

MIT Researchers Release Music Made by Spiders

By Dan Robitzski

A team of scientists built a bacteria's genetic code from scratch and, after years of improvements, got it to reproduce just like the real thing.

Scientists Engineer Synthetic Bacteria That Multiplies Like the Real Thing

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists developed a gene-hacked version of the fall armyworm, a notorious pest, that lays eggs that die off before hatching.

Scientists Gene-Hacked a Pest Caterpillar’s Eggs to Self-Destruct

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists accidentally discovered a bizarre ecosystem of creatures on the seafloor under Antarctica, hundreds of miles from any apparent source of food.

Scientists Surprised by “Strange Creatures” Under a Mile of Antarctic Ice

By Dan Robitzski

MIT scientists engineered spinach plants with carbon nanotubes that can send alerts when they spot pollution, explosives, or signs of climate change.

MIT Scientists Hack Spinach Plants to Send Emails

By Dan Robitzski

A team of scientists found that Irish soda bread can serve as a viable, low-cost alternative for cell scaffolding in the lab.

Scientists Are Using Bread as a Scaffold for Human Cells

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists caught octopuses occasionally punching nearby fish on film. Sometimes its to keep them in line during a hunt, other times it just seems spiteful.

Scientists Say That “Spiteful” Octopuses Punch Fish When They’re Angry

By Dan Robitzski

Google's DeepMind AI team built an algorithm called AlphaFold 2 that can solved the protein folding problem with better accuracy than any other team.

Google AI Solves Longstanding, Near-Impossible Biology Problem

By Dan Robitzski

With the recent discovery of phosphorus, scientists have found all six elements on a list of crucial ingredients for life on various comets.

Comets Can Carry the Six Most Important Elements for Life on Earth

By Dan Robitzski

New research shows that amino acids can form in space without energy input, suggesting they may be older than stars and planets.

Building Blocks of Life Can Form in Deep Space, Scientists Say

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists identified a change in blue whales' songs that signals they're about to migrate south. They say it could be used to warn ships in the area.

Scientists Suggest Teaching Ships to Speak Whale Language

By Dan Robitzski

When the world around them quieted down, white-crowned sparrows living near San Francisco learned a new, more intricate song.

Birds Learned a New Song During the Pandemic

By Dan Robitzski

Colleges that pivoted to online education still need to find out how to do science labwork — some are mailing animal parts to students to dissect at home.

Colleges Are Mailing Brains to Students to Dissect at Home

By Dan Robitzski

New optical tweezers can pick up objects as small as ten nanometers, potentially improving the way biologists investigate molecules.

Engineers Build Tweezers So Tiny They Can Pick Up Individual Molecules

By Dan Robitzski

In order to learn how cells can navigate large distances within our bodies, scientists plopped them into increasingly-complex mazes.

Researchers Forced Living Cells to Navigate Tiny Mazes

By Dan Robitzski

Research suggests scientists should pay greater attention to their lab mice's well-being. Not only for the mice's sake, but because it improves the science.

Scientists: Lab Mice Deserve Happier Lives

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists have long suggested that microbes could theoretically live in the sulfurous clouds of Venus. An MIT team has more ideas on how that would work.

MIT Scientists Suggest Life Could Thrive in the Clouds of Venus

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists saw bacteria subjected to different conditions rapidly develop different evolutionary strategies, helping explain why some become dangerous.

Scientists Just Watched Bacteria Evolve in Real Time

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists can use magnetic fields to levitate dead cells, all without disturbing the living cells crucial to their experiments.

Bioengineers Are Using Levitation on Dead Cells to Preserve the Living

By Dan Robitzski

A team of scientists encoded the entire "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" into a double strand of DNA to demo a vastly improved storage technology.

Scientists Stored “The Wizard of Oz” on a Strand of DNA

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists discovered the first bacteria that chemosynthesizes the metal manganese, and they did it almost by accident while cleaning up an experiment.

Newly-Discovered Bacteria Can Eat Metal as Food

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists assume the first life on Earth used RNA and that DNA developed later. But an experiment suggests both genetic molecules formed at the same time.

Experiment Shows That DNA May Have Existed Before Life

By Dan Robitzski

While working from home during the ongoing global pandemic, biologists have plenty of time — and they're discovering new insect species left and right.

Biologists Are Somehow Discovering a Ton of New Species in Quarantine

By Victor Tangermann

A team of scientists recreated the conditions under which life originated. They think they've kickstarted the whole process by generating new vesicles.

Scientists Claim to Have Recreated Earth’s First Life

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists gene-hacked human cells to fully integrate that structures that let some squids turn transparent, giving the cells the ability to scatter light.

Scientists Gene-Hack Human Cells to Turn Invisible

By Dan Robitzski

Scientist Discovers Gross New Fungus on Twitter

Scientist Discovers Gross New Fungus on Twitter

By Victor Tangermann

A team of researchers managed to create the most thoroughly-intermixed human-mouse chimera hybrids to date, thanks to a weird stem cell-manipulating trick.

Scientists Are Creating Mouse-Human Hybrids

By Dan Robitzski

A team of neuroscientists just created a complete, three-dimensional map of a mouse brain that they say could be a game changer for researchers.

Scientists Plot 100 Million Cells to Map Full 3D Mouse Brain

By Dan Robitzski

NASA' Perseverance rover just found signs of ancient life in Australia, giving researchers hope that it's well-equipped to do the same on Mars.

NASA Mars Rover Detects Ancient Life… in Australia

By Dan Robitzski

Hong Kong researchers developed a protective coating that they say can kill the coronavirus on treated surfaces for up to three months.

This Disinfectant Can Keep Surfaces Coronavirus-Free for Months

By Dan Robitzski

Xenobots mark a major step forward in biological robots. The tiny, short-lived creatures are designed in a virtual world then 3D printed with living cells.

Scientists Are Printing Living “Xenobots” out of Biological Cells

By Dan Robitzski

A new study reveals a bizarre link: on days that solar storms mess with the magnetic field, more gray whales beach themselves.

Solar Storms May Cause Whales to Crash Into Beaches

By Dan Robitzski

A team of researchers and citizen scientists discovered a never-before-classified species of rare snail and named it after climate activist Greta Thunberg.

Scientists Discover New Snail, Name It After Greta Thunberg

German scientists say that for the first time ever, they've created a lab-grown artificial genome that can reproduce itself like a living organism.

Scientists Create Artificial Genome That Can Reproduce

By Jon Christian

Four newly-discovered sharks use their fins to crawl across coral reefs — and can also walk across short stretches of dry land.

Sharks Are Evolving to Walk on Land

By Dan Robitzski

A team of scientists is exploring a bizarre idea: finding a way to build structures, circuitry, and other materials out of living fungal architecture.

These Researchers Want You to Live In a Fungus Megastructure

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists sequenced the entire giant squid genome, revealing new hints into how the unusual creature reached its huge size and developed a complex brain.

Researchers Finally Sequence Giant Squid’s Entire Genome

By Dan Robitzski

A true mad scientist bred 97 different kinds of broccoli and mapped their DNA. The verdict? all of them were "delicious."

A Researcher Grew 97 Kinds of Broccoli and Sequenced Their DNA

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists built a new remote acoustic survey tool to track wild frog populations. The best part is they decided to name it the FrogPhone.

Scientists Built a “FrogPhone” to Remotely Survey Frog Habitats

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists observed surprisingly complex behavior from a single-celled organism that strongly resembles active decisionmaking.

This Single-Celled Creature Is Weirdly Smart

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists are learning more and more ways to gene-hack new traits into animals, including genetic alterations that could enhance their intelligence.

Fringe Idea: Should We Gene-Hack Animals to Make Them Smarter?

By Dan Robitzski

A visit to the seafloor at the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill revealed a nightmarish landscape populated by gruesome, tumor-filled sea life.

The Deepwater Horizon Spill Created Horrific Mutant Creatures

By Dan Robitzski

Wally Conron, the first person to breed a labradoodle, regrets his experiment and says he opened Pandora's box by creating the crossbreed dog.

Labradoodle Creator Says Dog Breed Is Insane, Diseased

By Dan Robitzski

A massive international study debunked the long-standing myth of a so-called "gay gene." The genetic links to sexual orientation are far more complex.

Huge Study Conclusively Debunks the “Gay Gene” Myth

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists found that lab-grown mini-brains on the International Space Station are giving off brain waves, potentially posing a new ethical dilemma.

Scientists Grew Tiny Human Brains and Hooked Them up to Robots

By Dan Robitzski

An experiment called BioRock is figuring out whether bacteria could turn space rocks into farmable soil for future off-world settlements.

Astronomers Want to Use Bacteria to Mine Space Rocks

By Dan Robitzski

News recently broke about worms that had allegedly been frozen in Arctic permafrost for 40,000 years. It turns out they're probably a lot younger.

That Story About the Ancient Frozen Worms Might Be Bologna

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists who were melting permafrost ice to look for ancient microbes were surprised to see a pile of 41,000 year-old worms wake up and wiggle around.

Scientists Melted Ancient Ice and a Long-Dead Worm Wriggled Out

By Dan Robitzski

A third CRISPR baby was expected to be due in late June or early July, but the Chinese government is keeping quiet about the gene-hacking controversy.

We May Never Know When That Third CRISPR Baby Is Born

By Dan Robitzski

Those Gene-Hacked Babies May Be Doomed to Die Young

Those Gene-Hacked Babies May Be Doomed to Die Young

By Dan Robitzski

An anaconda gave birth via parthenogenesis, where it produced offspring without mating. Now, scientists confirm that the offspring are genetic replicas.

The Science Behind an Anaconda’s “Virgin Birth”

By Dan Robitzski

Science writer Philip Ball donated some arm flesh to a lab that grew a miniature brain out of his cells. It made him question how we define humanity.

A Lab Grew a “Mini Brain” From This Guy’s Cells. Then Things Got Weird.

By Dan Robitzski

Using a powerful supercomputer, scientists simulated every single one of the billion atoms found in a human gene. It may help them crack genetic disease.

Scientists Simulated Every Single Atom of a Single Gene

By Dan Robitzski

Scientists are using CRISPR technology to develop new model organisms. But actually keeping the gene-hacked critters alive comes with new challenges.

Scientists Are Having Trouble Keeping Gene-Hacked Creatures Alive

By Dan Robitzski