biology (Page 2)

Latest in biology

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 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

New tech can convert plastic garbage into safe, edible protein, potentially giving us an answer to the mountains of trash choking the planet.

New Tech Turns Plastic Waste Into Food

By Dan Robitzski

A team of scientists uncovered a sort of fossil record of dozens of ancient, never-before-seen viruses in a sample of Tibetan ice.

Scientists Discover Dozens of Ancient Viruses, Frozen in Ice

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

A biotech company called Oxitec plans to release 500 million gene-hacked mosquitoes in the Florida Keys -- and residents are furious.

Residents Furious at Release of 500 Million Gene-Hacked Mosquitoes

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

According to a new study by scientists from NASA and the German Aerospace Center, some Earthling microbes could survive the hostile conditions on Mars.

Black Mold From Earth Could Survive on Mars, NASA Says

By Victor Tangermann

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

Research shows that the human species is rapidly evolving: The percent of people with a medial artery in their forearms has grown over the last 150 years.

Humans Are Evolving a New Artery

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

A new enzyme, which is really a hybrid of two others, can break down plastic waste six times faster than the next best one.

Scientists Create Enzyme That Devours Plastic at Incredible Speed

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

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

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

Scientists found a shark that had its teeth and skin almost completely eaten away by ocean acidification and chemical pollution.

Pollution Dissolved This Shark’s Teeth and Skin, Researchers Say

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 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

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

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 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

New research suggests that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is actually a genetic hybrid of a bat and pangolin virus that happened to swap genes.

Scientists: Coronavirus Likely a Hybrid of Two Other Viruses

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

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

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

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 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

After photographing dead bodies for 17 months, scientists at a body farm made a greusome discovery: decomposing corpses wriggle around as they dry up.

Horrifying Study: Corpses Thrash Around For a Year After Death

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

Before we make first contact with any aliens out there, we should figure out whether we're willing to kill them to further our scientific knowledge.

Scientist: We Should Be Prepared to Kill Aliens

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

Russian scientists want to study reproduction and fertility in space, but cosmonauts are refusing to provide some crucial biological samples.

Cosmonauts Refuse to Provide Semen Samples in Space

By Dan Robitzski

U.S. lawmakers proposed an amendment to federal patent law that would let biotech and pharma companies patent human genes.

New Law Would Let Corporations Patent Human Genes

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