31+ 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…...

2+ hour, 53+ 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…...

4+ hour, 41+ 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,…...

5+ hour, 50+ 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....

12+ hour, 55+ min ago   (325+ words) Pregnancy can last just a few weeks in some animals, while others carry their young for many months. But there is one animal whose pregnancy is so long that it can stretch to almost two years. So, which animal has…...

10+ hour ago   (620+ words) Every heartbeat, every twitch of a fin, and every dividing cell in a fish embryo depends on a molecular machine so ancient that its origins trace back billions of years. Oxidative phosphorylation, or OXPHOS, is the process by which cells…...

11+ hour, 3+ min ago   (681+ words) Across the flooded fields and scrubby foothills of South Asia lives a frog that most people, including many biologists, would struggle to tell apart from its close relatives. The burrowing frog Sphaerotheca maskeyi, a medium-sized member of the family Dicroglossidae,…...

11+ hour, 25+ min ago   (671+ words) When the tide recedes from a rocky Mediterranean shore, the mussels clinging to the stones simply close their shells and wait. Inside those shells, oxygen levels plummet, carbon dioxide accumulates, and the entire body shifts into a biochemical holding pattern…...

21+ hour, 6+ min ago   (48+ words) ...

1+ day, 5+ hour ago   (705+ words) The reduction appears to be unique in the millipede order Polydesmida, and in both known adult females the flattened leg bases sit over the vulva like a lid. More than forty adult males came out of the same litter sample, and…...