6+ hour, 31+ min ago   (521+ words) Bacteria are famous for forming patterns, from the concentric rings of Proteus colonies to the branching networks that motile microbes paint across agar plates. Now researchers at Columbia University have turned one of biology’s most familiar workhorses, Escherichia coli, into…...

9+ hour ago   (534+ words) Mapping the wiring of the brain at nanometer resolution has long demanded a punishing trade-off: electron microscopy can reveal every synaptic cleft and organelle, but imaging even a cubic millimeter of neural tissue this way takes months or years of…...

10+ hour, 25+ min ago   (707+ words) Detecting dangerous bacteria in a patient’s sample can take hours or even days, and the fastest molecular tests demand expensive laboratory infrastructure and highly trained staff....

11+ hour, 18+ 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,…...

11+ hour, 51+ 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…...

12+ hour, 4+ min ago   (529+ words) Neuroscientists can now record electrical storms of activity from tens of thousands of neurons at once, but a stubborn bottleneck has long stood between the raw data and discovery: turning enormous three-dimensional calcium imaging videos into clean, trustworthy lists of…...

12+ hour, 4+ 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…...

12+ hour, 54+ 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,…...

14+ hour, 4+ 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....

14+ hour, 55+ 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....