The story of life’s beginnings gets stranger when you look closely at viruses. These tiny entities seem to sit at the edge of ...

Around 1.7 billion years ago, eukaryotes—the building blocks of complex life—first appeared on Earth, and now scientists have ...

Every second, hundreds to thousands of molecules move through thousands of nuclear pores in each of your cells. A new high-definition view reveals the machine in action.

Scientists are trying to understand how complex life emerged on Earth about 2 billion years ago. Our microbial ancestors could be the key.

Our single-celled ancestor lived in a world without plants, animals or oxygen-rich oceans. Yet, this seemingly simple microorganism took the first steps toward complex life. From this ancestor emerged ...

Scientists are trying to understand how complex life emerged on Earth about 2 billion years ago. Our microbial ancestors could be the key.

Eukaryotes—the building blocks of complex life—appeared on Earth 1.7 billion years ago, and now scientists have solved a longstanding riddle about their origin.

Genetics tools have advanced significantly in recent decades, and have allowed scientist to sequence all of the genetic ...

Ancient microbes tied to our earliest ancestors could use oxygen, reshaping ideas about how complex life began on Earth.

The molecular building blocks that make up the cells of humans, animals and plants so sophisticated appear to be older than scientists previously ...

The origin of the nucleus remains hotly debated among scientists, but new imaging and genomic data are shedding light on this billion-year-old mystery.

Late in 2025, we covered the development of an AI system called Evo that was trained on massive numbers of bacterial genomes. So many that, when prompted with sequences from a cluster of related genes ...