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

When Charles Darwin first proposed how evolution works in 1859, it seemed plausible. Tiny changes stack up over time, eventually leading a species to become something entirely different. Aside from ...

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

Professor Indraneel Mittra and his team show that DNA fragments from dying cells function as agents of horizontal gene transfer in mammalian cells. For decades, scientists have known that bacteria can ...

Scientists may have a step forward in understanding how life on our planet came to exist. The mystery of how tiny molecules of RNA came to be enclosed within membranes, forming the very first cells, ...

A giant DNA virus pulled from a Japanese freshwater pond is forcing scientists to rethink how complex cells first acquired their defining feature: the nucleus. Named ushikuvirus, the newly ...

They were hardly modest, these two brash young scientists who in 1953 declared to patrons of the Eagle Pub in Cambridge, England, that they had "found the secret of life." But James Watson and Francis ...