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The primordial soup that gave birth to life on Earth may have had an extra, previously unrecognised ingredient: a "molecular midwife" that played a crucial role in allowing the first large biomolecules to assemble from their building blocks.

Forming a double helix prevents the RNA from going round in circles (Image: Laguna Design/SPL)
The earliest life forms [...]

A giant squid is heading back to New Zealand, after being "stuffed" with silicone and preserved for posterity.

Preserved (Image: Von Hagens Dalian Plastination Ltd)
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In 2004, a pair of Architeuthis dux were sent from New Zealand to a plastination facility in Dalian, China, to be preserved by anatomist Gunther von Hagens.
Plastination is a body-preservation [...]

Biologists discovered a specific region of genes involved in the genomic adaptation of saltwater populations of stickleback fish to freshwater lakes in Alaska. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Oregon)

ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2010) — Twenty billion pieces of DNA in 100 small fish have opened the eyes of biologists studying evolution. After combining new technologies, [...]

ScienceDaily (Mar. 6, 2010) — In the life sciences, the safe long-term storage of living materials such as cells or whole organisms, as well as their worldwide exchange between research groups, is becoming more and more important. The University of Freiburg now supports this free material transfer with the establishment of an international centre for [...]

The earliest microbes that survived on land may have synthesized fat molecules to prevent their death from dehydration.

The molecules, called wax esters, could have helped the microbes colonize land by protecting them against the harsh environments that probably characterized the lifeless continents, scientists hypothesizes in the March issue of Geology .
“Production of [wax esters] may represent an adaptation to cross a [...]

This compilation of scanning electron microscope images of organisms includes, at left, Paleocene nannofossils from 60-55 million years ago. These fossils are all post Cretacious Paleogene boundary. At right are several living nannoplankton species. Most of the objects in this compilation are also about 8 microns. (Credit: Timothy Bralower; Penn State)This compilation of scanning electron [...]

Supercool. As individual water molecules fluctuate, breaking and forming bonds with their nearest neighbors, the result is slightly imperfect tetrahedral structures that are constantly in flux. Research suggests that these fluctuations give rise to some of water's most unusual and life-sustaining features. (Credit: Image courtesy of Rockefeller University)

ScienceDaily (Feb. 27, 2010) — The key to [...]

Half a century after Jane Goodall began studying chimpanzees in Tanzania, she talks to her former student Charlotte Uhlenbroek about chimpanzee fire-dancing, the peril of bushmeat and the empowerment of local people

Showing no signs of slowing down (Image: Michael Nagle/Getty)
"EVERYBODY studying animals in the wild today needs to be aware of the need for conservation [...]

ScienceDaily (Feb. 17, 2010) — Plants and people alike face critical choices as they reproduce: to make a few big, well-provisioned seeds — or babies–or many small, poorly-provisioned ones. Different species make strikingly different choices, resulting in a great diversity of life forms: Darwin's "endless forms most beautiful.

Helene Muller-Landau's new model explaining the relationship between [...]

Biologist Ronald Bassar of UC Riverside hunts for guppies in a stream in Trinidad. (Credit: Sonya Auer, UC Riverside.)

ScienceDaily (Feb. 9, 2010) — Biologists have known for long that ecology, the interaction between organisms and their environment, plays a significant role in forming new species and in modifying living ones. The traditional view is that [...]