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How did life originate? Scientists have been studying the question for decades, and they've developed ingenious methods to try to find out. They've even enlisted biology's most powerful theory, Darwinian evolution, in the search. But they still don't have a complete answer. What they have hit is the world's most theoretically fertile dead end. When scientists look for life's origins, they usually work in one of two directions. They work backwards in time through the record of organisms that have lived on Earth, or they work forward from one of the many hypothetical prebiotic worlds in which life could have emerged.

study reveals the Pac-Man-like strategies adopted by different cell types when making long journeys through an organism

The partial skull of an armoured fish that swam in the oceans over 400m years ago could turn the evolutionary history of sharks on its head, researchers have said.

A fifth of carbon dioxide emissions come from multinational companies' global supply chains, according to a new study led by UCL and Tianjin University that shows the scope of multinationals' influence on climate change.

team of scientists from ASU and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) led by Hao Yan, ASU's Milton Glick Professor in the School of Molecular Sciences, and director of the ASU Biodesign Institute's Center for Molecular Design and Biomimetics, has just announced the creation of a new type of meta-DNA structures that will open up the fields of optoelectronics (including information storage and encryption) as well as synthetic biology.

In rodents with type 2 diabetes, a single surgical injection of a protein called fibroblast growth factor 1 can restore blood sugar levels to normal for weeks or months. Yet how this growth factor acts in the brain to generate this lasting benefit has been poorly understood.

Second infections raise questions about long-term immunity to COVID-19 and the prospects for a vaccine.

relentless and often unpredictable coronavirus has, among its many quirky terrors, dredged up once again the issue that will not die, science versus pseudoscience. The scientists, experts who would be the first to admit they are not infallible, are now in danger of being drowned out by the growing chorus of pseudoscientists, conspiracy theorists, and just plain troublemakers who seem to be as symptomatic of the virus as fever and weakness.

The physicists who run the world's most sensitive experimental search for dark matter have seen something strange. They have uncovered an unexpected excess of events inside their detector that could fit the profile of a hypothetical dark matter particle called an axion. Alternately, the data could be explained by novel properties of neutrinos. More mundanely, the signal could come from contamination inside the experiment.