1+ hour, 18+ min ago   (744+ words) For decades, the central obstacle to testing therapies that slow human aging has been painfully simple: aging takes decades to measure. A drug that genuinely delays the biological processes of aging would need years, often a lifetime, of follow-up before…...

1+ hour, 39+ min ago   (597+ words) The genomes of true frogs have long puzzled geneticists. Amphibians are famous for carrying some of the largest and most repetitive genomes among vertebrates, and yet the detailed architecture of their repetitive DNA has remained poorly explored compared with mammals,…...

2+ hour, 1+ min ago   (537+ words) Deep in the steaming runoff channels of Taiwan’s hot springs, a group of microbes has been quietly rewriting the rules of photosynthesis. These are the far-red light-utilizing cyanobacteria, or FRLCyano, organisms capable of extending oxygenic photosynthesis beyond the visible spectrum…...

2+ hour, 12+ min ago   (75+ words) Rare cells punch far above their weight in biology. Populations that make up less than one percent of a tissue can drive tumor progression, immune evasion, drug resistance, and relapse, while others mark the first steps of lineage commitment or…...

2+ hour, 25+ min ago   (95+ words) Every seed is a masterpiece of biological engineering, a compact package in which molecular order and cellular design are woven together to protect and nourish a future plant. For scientists trying to understand how crops such as the yellow pea…...

3+ hour, 15+ min ago   (83+ words) When the first fish lineage crawled onto land some 375 million years ago, its fins had to be remodeled into limbs capable of bearing weight. Evolutionary biologists have long focused on the genes that pattern the skeleton—Hox clusters, Sonic hedgehog,…...

4+ hour, 25+ min ago   (628+ words) A new open-source software package promises to transform how biologists hunt for the genetic switches that separate males from females in species with no reference genome....

4+ hour, 47+ min ago   (568+ words) Beneath the sun-baked soils of eastern and southern Africa, a family of rodents has quietly rewritten the rules of mammalian life. Naked mole-rats resist cancer, tolerate near-anoxic conditions and barely age. Damaraland mole-rats dig elaborate tunnel networks and live in…...

5+ hour, 16+ min ago   (880+ words) Cryо-electron tomography has quietly become one of the most powerful windows into the interior of cells, allowing researchers to peer at the molecular machinery of life in a state close to its native, frozen-hydrated condition....

5+ hour, 32+ min ago   (87+ words) Cellular senescence, one of the most closely studied hallmarks of aging, has long been a paradox in biology. On the one hand, it protects organisms by halting the division of damaged cells that might otherwise become cancerous. On the other,…...