22+ 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,…...

54+ 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…...

1+ hour, 8+ 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…...

1+ hour, 8+ 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…...

1+ hour, 57+ 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,…...

13+ hour, 59+ min ago   (168+ words) Google mapped the complete brain and central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly, reconstructing more than 166,000 individual neurons. Google's fully mapped fruit fly brain is barely a week old, and it's already been put to work doing what…...

3+ hour, 7+ 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....

3+ hour, 58+ 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....

4+ hour, 14+ 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,…...

4+ hour, 24+ min ago   (680+ words) Natural killer cells have long been celebrated as the swift, unsung assassins of the immune system, capable of detecting and destroying tumor cells without the elaborate priming that T cells require....