Around 1.7 billion years ago, eukaryotes—the building blocks of complex life—first appeared on Earth, and now scientists have ...

Genetics tools have advanced significantly in recent decades, and have allowed scientist to sequence all of the genetic material they find in any sample. That has enabled researchers to discover giant ...

Tom has a master’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Oxford and his interests range from immunology and microscopy to the philosophy of science.View full profile Tom has a master’s degree ...

Our single-celled ancestor lived in a world without plants, animals or oxygen-rich oceans. Yet, this seemingly simple microorganism took the first steps toward complex life. From this ancestor emerged ...

The origins of complex, nucleated cellular life – everything from amoebas to humans – may date back a lot further in Earth's history than we thought. A new study tracing the earliest steps toward ...

A microscopic creature from a boiling hot spring in Northern California has just reset the upper limit for how hot complex life can run. The newly described “fire amoeba” thrives at temperatures that ...

Every second, hundreds to thousands of molecules move through thousands of nuclear pores in each of your cells. A new high-definition view reveals the machine in action.

In the oceans and on land, scientists are discovering rare, transitional organisms that bridge the gap between Earth’s simplest cells and today’s complex ones. By Carl Zimmer A flurry of new studies ...

New work shows that physical folding of the genome to control genes located far away may have been a critical turning point for life on Earth. For evolutionary biologists, what most distinguishes the ...

Research and drug discovery are undergoing a transformation, driven by the rise of 3D cell culture models that better replicate human biology. Unlike traditional 2D cultures and animal models, which ...