22+ hour, 14+ min ago   (84+ words) When forensic investigators recover human remains, one of the first and most fundamental questions they must answer is simple to ask but often difficult to answer: was this person male or female? A new study published in the International Journal…...

22+ hour, 42+ 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…...

23+ hour, 18+ min ago   (529+ words) Every cell in the brain carries essentially the same genome, yet the same gene can produce a startling variety of RNA molecules. Through a process called alternative splicing, segments of a gene’s transcript can be included, skipped, or rearranged, generating…...

1+ day, 55+ min ago   (587+ words) A team of researchers in China has sequenced the first complete mitochondrial genome of the jumping plant louse Bactericera gobica and, by combining it with nearly every other Triozidae mitogenome available, assembled the most comprehensive genetic dataset ever compiled for…...

1+ day, 1+ 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…...

1+ day, 2+ hour ago   (618+ words) Every day, computational biologists release new methods for analyzing genomes, single cells, microbiomes and molecular signatures, and every day researchers struggle with the same question: which method actually works best for their data? The answer usually depends on benchmarks—structured…...