Microbes in extreme heat and cold hold lessons about life on Earth, and beyond

Microbes have the ability to survive in extremely hot and cold conditions. This makes them invaluable tools for research: they can teach us how …

New tail design

Planted music

Evolution with full stops and commas

Darwinian sapience takes a beating as the notion of 'punctuated equilibrium' - which postulates that evolution occurred in sudden fits and starts -…

Darwin's Walk and The Last Wave: Disappearing Landscapes, Declining Species

This book describes the reasons humankind may be facing its last moments on Planet Earth. 

Mortal combat

Can life be extended indefinitely? There is a renewed vigour among scientists looking for ways and means to cheat death

Adam’s luck

Men, after all, may not become extinct. Y chromosome has lost only one gene in 25 million years

True green

Lactating males

Pummelled into life

From Adam to ape

God, says the Kansas State Board of Education in the US, created the world in seven says. Evolution therefore doesn't exist. A new curriculum …

It's all in the cells

There is more than one way to become small

The munchers

Weaving a cell

A scientist, a Marxist and a dreamer

Thirty-five years ago, a renowned British biologist branded England "a criminal state" and migrated to India. Today, in the year of his birth …

Immortality is mathematically impossible, new research finds

A mathematical equation has proven that controlling one of the two major changes in a cell—decay or cancerous growth—enhances the …

Overwhelmingly WEIRD!

The edifice of Western science is built on generalisation, where homogeneity has replaced diversity

Decoding life

What shaped human intelligence?

Scientists are trying to uncover the adaptive pressures that transformed primates into intelligent humans

Mite but mighty!

The key to unravelling the mysteries of the earth could actually lie in the functioning of organisms so small that a million of them could be …

Flying high

Birds can remember. And quite well too. A new experiment sheds more light on how they do it

The wing thing

Guess what is similar to the dull wings of a fruitfly and the colourful ones of a butterfly

Science goes for a six

The US state f Kansas decides to remove the theory of evolution from school currilum

The nepotism chemical

Bacteria need a quorum, too

As any sensible invader, virulent bacteria ensure that there are enough of them before they attack