Most people know only two things about the appendix: You don’t need it – and if it bursts, you need surgery fast. That basic story traces back at least to Charles Darwin, the English naturalist who ...

A nearly complete dinosaur skeleton discovered in Patagonia is helping scientists crack the mystery of alvarezsaurs, a bizarre group of bird-like dinosaurs. The fossil of Alnashetri cerropoliciensis ...

The story of life’s beginnings gets stranger when you look closely at viruses. These tiny entities seem to sit at the edge of biology. They carry genetic material, but they cannot make proteins on ...

In Lake Malawi, hundreds of species of cichlid fish have evolved with astonishing speed, offering scientists a rare opportunity to study how biodiversity arises.

All complex biological systems—like the DNA, RNA and proteins constantly being copied and built within our cells—are prone to errors. That means as life evolved to be more elaborate, it also had to ...

Evolution is perhaps the most extraordinary story ever told—a tale spanning billions of years that connects every living thing on Earth through an intricate ...

Researchers have created a method called optovolution that uses light to guide the evolution of proteins with dynamic behaviors. By engineering yeast cells so their survival depended on proteins ...

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One hundred years ago a young teacher, John T. Scopes, went on trial in Dayton, Tenn., for violating a recently enacted state law that forbade the state’s educators “to teach any theory that denies ...