26+ min ago   (1076+ words) The genes behind bat lifespan overlap with the genes that handle viruses, and one key immune gene comes in up to three copies. A bigger mammal usually lives longer, and bats are a striking exception. Among the mouse-eared bats, body…...

51+ min ago   (959+ words) Meet the tiny mammal that survived the dino-killing asteroid to became our earliest ancestor As the ‘Age of the Dinosaurs’ came to an abrupt end 66 million years ago, another evolutionary story began, the ‘Rise of the Primates’, and it starts…...

35+ min ago   (855+ words) Ahead of The Independent’s Climate 100 List being published later this month, we are celebrating some of those being honoured. Emma Henderson meets the Kenyan entrepreneur whose university project helped find a solution and value for one of the country’s worst…...

5+ hour, 37+ min ago   (832+ words) While on a university field trip in 2022, the boat Joseph Nguthiru was traversing Kenya's Lake Naivasha in, suddenly came to a halt. It became tangled up in water hyacinth, an invasive plant that covers much of the water. Here, he…...

8+ hour, 35+ min ago   (403+ words) A piece of burnt coconut helped scientists uncover a species new to science in Sri Lanka. The discovery began more than 2 decades ago, when researchers trapped two unusual mice in the Knuckles Mountain Range. The animal has now been formally…...

4+ hour, 19+ min ago   (33+ words) It despises me in my very core that we– given a perfect conscience, sight, and hearing- could access the internet perfectly …...

4+ hour, 20+ 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…...

8+ hour, 56+ min ago   (117+ words) High on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, where flocks of Black Tibetan sheep graze at altitudes of roughly 3,000 meters in China’s Qinghai Province, a routine husbandry practice is quietly rewriting the biochemical identity of one of the region’s most prized meats. Castration…...

9+ hour, 7+ 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,…...

12+ hour, 15+ 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…...