Genetics News

People experience the world through five senses but sharks, paddlefishes and certain other aquatic vertebrates have a sixth sense: They can detect weak electrical fields in the water and use this information to detect prey, communicate and orient themselv

As anyone familiar with the phrase 'man-flu' will know women consider themselves to be the more robust side of the species when it comes to health and illness.

Direct studies of ancient DNA from Neanderthal bones suggest interbreeding did occur after anatomically modern humans had migrated from their evolutionary cradle in Africa to the cooler climates of Eurasia

A remarkably well-preserved fossil discovered in northeast China provides new information about the earliest ancestors of most of today's mammal species -- the placental mammals. According to a paper published August 25 in the journal Nature, this fossil

Boys are maturing physically earlier than ever before. The age of sexual maturity has been decreasing by about 2.5 months each decade at least since the middle of the 18th century

Reorganization of the brain and sense organs could be the key to the evolutionary success of vertebrates, one of the great puzzles in evolutionary biology, according to a paper by an international team of researchers, published August 17 in Nature.

CSIRO plant scientists have shed light on a problem that has puzzled researchers since the first virus was discovered in 1892 -- how exactly do they cause disease?

With a little help from genetic engineering, researchers at one Massachusetts company say they've created an organism that takes sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and creates liquid fuel

A genetic study focusing on the Central American river turtle (Dermatemys mawii) recently turned up surprising results for a team of Smithsonian scientists involved in the conservation of this critically endangered species

Harvard researchers developing genome-scale editing tools as fast and easy as word processing have rewritten the genome of living cells using the genetic equivalent of search and replace -- and combined those rewrites in novel cell strains, strikingly dif