48+ min ago   (744+ words) For decades, the central obstacle to testing therapies that slow human aging has been painfully simple: aging takes decades to measure. A drug that genuinely delays the biological processes of aging would need years, often a lifetime, of follow-up before…...

1+ hour, 9+ 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,…...

1+ hour, 9+ min ago   (68+ words) Aging has become a product. Across North America and Europe, companies now sell direct-to-consumer epigenetic tests that estimate a customer’s biological age from DNA methylation patterns, often bundled with supplements and lifestyle programs marketed as capable of slowing or even…...

3+ hour, 55+ 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....

4+ hour, 17+ 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…...

4+ hour, 26+ min ago   (55+ words) Deep within the human genome lies an ancient threat. Long interspersed elements-1, known as LINE-1 or L1, are the only autonomous transposable elements still active in our DNA, making up roughly 17 percent of the genome. When these genetic parasites leap to…...

7+ hour, 23+ min ago   (704+ words) Every cell in the body carries a hidden biography. Long before a researcher harvests a tissue and sequences its contents, that cell has been bombarded by hormones, growth factors, cytokines and stress signals, and its current state is the accumulated…...

8+ hour, 5+ min 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…...

8+ hour, 52+ min ago   (695+ words) For nearly two decades, behavioural ecologists have been fascinated by the fact that animals are not simply bundles of independent traits. A bold individual tends to be an aggressive one; a curious animal often takes more risks. These consistent suites…...

12+ hour, 26+ min ago   (607+ words) Deep inside the mammalian placenta, a quiet genetic tug-of-war shapes how much a growing fetus asks of its mother....