The first steps of human development—those that occur within the first few weeks of pregnancy—remain mysterious in many ways. Within a week of fertilization, human embryos form a blastocyst, which ...

A research team led by Professors Yixuan Wang and Shaorong Gao from the School of Life Sciences and Technology at Tongji University has made significant progress in understanding early human embryonic ...

In some mammals, the timing of the normally continuous embryonic development can be altered to improve the chances of survival for both the embryo and the mother. This mechanism to temporarily slow ...

The earliest moments of human development—between the time of fertilization and when the embryo implants in the womb—have remained opaque to scientists. Cells in the earliest stages of human ...

In some mammals, the timing of the normally continuous embryonic development can be altered to improve the chances of survival for both the embryo and the mother. This mechanism to temporarily slow ...

At some point in our evolution, we lost the ability to activate a reproductive mechanism called embryonic diapause, which slows development, usually during the blastocyst stage. And so, unlike mammals ...

We have all had one, and we owe our lives to it. It’s the first organ to develop and it simultaneously serves as the lungs, kidneys, immune system, and digestive tract, to name a few, in a fetus while ...

The embryos of many species can stop developing when starved of nutrients, only to restart the process once these are restored – and scientists may have figured out how they do it. In the early stages ...