Biology

Scientists in the United Kingdom and the United States have created synthetic human-like embryos without the need for eggs or sperm. While the embryo does not have a brain or heartbeat, scientists are hopeful that it will shed light on the cause of miscarriages and genetic diseases.A Mononykus Hunts In ‘Prehistoric Planet’The research team is using the synthetic embryos, in part, to discover why some pregnancies do not continue after the first 14 days of fertilization. “We know remarkably little about this step in human…

Look, we get it—bees are fantastic. As more people keep piling into cities over the coming decades, we’ll need more of these insects to pollinate urban green spaces, which provide fresh produce and the biomass that can cool a metropolis. But while deploying as many flowering species as possible to attract bees, cities risk sidelining an underappreciated champion of pollination: the humble moth. If moths haven’t been top of mind recently, it’s not your fault. Moths are inherently more difficult to study than bees because…

International researchers studying the yellow crazy ant, or Anoplolepis gracilipes, found that male ants of this species are chimeras, containing two genomes from different parent cells within their bodies. This unique reproductive process, originating from a single fertilized egg that undergoes separate maternal and paternal nuclear division, is unprecedented and challenges the fundamental biological inheritance law stating that all cells of an individual should contain the same genome. Credit: Hugo DarrasMale yellow…

Even some species that are found while they are still alive are already on the brink. In fact, research suggests that it’s precisely the newly described species that tend to have the highest risk of going extinct. Many new species are only now being discovered because they’re rare, isolated, or both—factors that also make them easier to wipe out, said Fraga. In 2018 in Guinea, for instance, botanist Denise Molmou of the National Herbarium of Guinea in Conakry discovered a new plant species that, like many of its…

I blame Yuval Noah Harari. Since the Israeli historian’s bestselling Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind in 2011, there has been a trend for thick tomes proposing to explain our humanity through one or other lens across deep time. Just this year, we have had books about how human history was shaped by epidemic disease (Jonathan Kennedy’s Pathogenesis), or by climate variation (Peter Frankopan’s The Earth Transformed). Now Lewis Dartnell, author of the brilliant The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch, and…

Every living thing spreads an invisible signature across its landscape, whether it’s a badger ambling through the grass, an oak growing in the forest, or an eagle soaring overhead. Fur, feathers, skin cells, spores, pollen—all of it is loaded with genetic information that floats away into a data-rich atmospheric soup. Scientists call this information environmental DNA, or eDNA, and it is so potent that in January 2022 researchers announced they’d been able to identify the species in two zoos just by sampling eDNA in the…

Scientists are starting to crack the mystery behind one woman’s pain-free life. In new research, a team in the UK dove deep into the genetic make-up of Jo Cameron, a woman in Scotland with a rare mutation that leaves her practically incapable of experiencing physical and emotional pain. Among other things, the team found that her mutation seems to turn on and off a variety of other genes, including those linked to wound healing and mood.A Mononykus Hunts In ‘Prehistoric Planet’Researchers at University College London…

Currently, very few heritable diseases have gene therapies that have been approved by the FDA. One therapy, called Zolgensma, treats spinal muscular atrophy in newborns and children up to age two. But halting the disease in childhood may still be too late to avoid lifelong health issues. “When the baby is born, in the most severe forms of the disease, the neurons that are affected in this disease are already sick,” says Beltrán Borges, a postdoctoral researcher of pediatric surgery at the University of California, San…

The finding that Lokis have actin tentacles adds plausibility to a eukaryogenesis scenario called the inside-out model, Spang and Schleper said. In 2014, the cell biologist Buzz Baum at University College London and his cousin, the evolutionary biologist David Baum of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, proposed an idea they had kicked around at family events: that the first eukaryotes were born after a simple ancestral cell extended protrusions past its cell walls. First these arms reached toward a symbiotic bacterium.…

Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin work outside the International Space Station to deploy and activate a radiator on the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module during a five-hour and 14-minute spacewalk on May 12, 2023. From top to bottom, the main station elements are Nauka with the European robotic arm and an experiment airlock attached, the Prichal docking module, and the Soyuz MS-23 crew ship. Credit: NASAToday the Expedition 69 ISS crew conducted various science experiments, prepared for the Ax-2 private…