The sun has just set on a quiet mudflat in Australia’s Northern Territory; it’ll set again in another 19 hours. A young moon looms large over the desolate landscape. No animals scurry in the waning ...

Long before plants and animals existed, Earth was dominated by microscopic organisms called prokaryotes. They lived simple, single-celled lives, soaking up nutrients in the oceans billions of years ...

A new study challenges a popular scenario put forward to explain the arrival of the first eukaryotic organisms. In the beginning, there was boredom. Following the emergence of cellular life on earth, ...

Researchers have discovered the first in-situ evidence of chlorophyll remnants in a billion-year-old multicellular algal microfossil preserved in shales from the Congo Basin. This discovery has made ...

In our cells, 6 feet (1.8 m) of DNA gets crammed into chromosomes that fit inside a 6-µm-wide nucleus. The proteins that help pack up that genetic material are histones, which act as spools around ...

DNA passed to and from all kinds of organisms, even across kingdoms, has helped shape the tree of life, to a large and undisputed degree in microbes and also unexpectedly in multicellular fungi, ...

It’s pretty hard to catch single-celled organisms in the middle of sex. “It’s sort of like if you put a male and a female together in the zoo. You can’t necessarily get them to do the thing,” John ...

In the beginning, there was boredom. Following the emergence of cellular life on earth, some 3.5 billion years ago, simple cells lacking a nucleus and other detailed internal structure dominated the ...