Nature doesn’t always make the things we need so three Nobel Prize winners figured out how to fast-track evolution in the lab to create medicines, biofuels and industrial chemicals for modern life.
A core idea in molecular biology is that one gene codes for one protein. Now biologists have found an example of a gene that yields two forms of a protein – enabling it to evolve new functionality.
New genetic technologies are letting us look at flu evolution right where it starts: within individual people, while they’re sick.
As viruses are transmitted from person to person they are constantly mutating and replicating. Could the SARS-CoV-2 virus evolve to evade the new vaccines that have just been developed?
If you go by editorial cartoons and T-shirts, you might have the impression that evolution proceeds as an orderly march toward a preordained finish line. But that’s not right at all.
Thirty years after the Supreme Court ruled that creationism cannot be required in schools, ‘creation science’ is still taught in some schools. What are the implications for climate education?
Many digital games claiming to simulate evolution are inaccurate. These errors can undermine the games’ potential educational benefits.
Contrary to the idea that apes evolved their upright posture to reach for fruit in the forest canopy, the earliest known ape with this stature, Morotopithecus, lived in more open grassy environments.
The last time that these two groups of cicadas emerged from underground together, Thomas Jefferson was president.
How do scientists figure out when evolutionary events – like species splitting away from a common ancestor – happened? It turns out our DNA is a kind of molecular clock, keeping time via genetic changes.
