Explore how living things work, from cells and genes to the systems inside our bodies. Discover the research changing our understanding of life.
24 stories & explainers · Newest first
Microscopes magnify structures far too small to see with the naked eye, which is how doctors and scientists can watch cilia beating inside a child's airway to diagnose rare diseases.
5 min read
A tiny forest of hair-like fibers beating in rhythm inside a child's windpipe just took top honors at a global microscopy video competition, revealing biology usually invisible to the naked eye.
2 min read
Vaccines work by teaching the body's defenses to recognize a germ before a real infection happens, which is why scientists study new vaccine designs, like ones targeting many strains of a bacterium at once.
5 min read
One bacterium wears more than 100 disguises, and it still kills hundreds of thousands of people a year through pneumonia and meningitis. Now researchers are working on a single vaccine that could catch nearly all of its forms at once.
2 min read
Picture the brain as a walled city that normally keeps the body's immune system locked outside. Stanford researchers now find that wall grows leaky with age, letting immune cells flood into brain tissue.
2 min read
Picture the rubbery cushions between your vertebrae slowly hardening into bone. That's what happened to zebrafish with a faulty collagen gene, until a drug already prescribed for osteoporosis stepped in and stopped it.
2 min read
Learn how your body's trillions of cells convert food and oxygen into usable energy, the basic process that keeps every organ, muscle, and thought running.
4 min read
Deep inside almost every cell in your body live tiny structures that make energy, and one biologist thinks they might also shape how you feel and think.
2 min read
A rock rolls downhill only because gravity pulls it, but a sunflower turns to face the sun as if it wants the light. Biologists are arguing over whether living things really do set their own goals, or whether that's just a convenient way of talking.
2 min read
Deep inside your brain sits a tiny cluster of neurons so old in evolutionary terms that even fish have them — and they may be the reason you can block out noise and concentrate on one thing at a time.
2 min read
Your brain receives millions of signals every second but only pays attention to a few. Learn how a deep brain structure called the thalamus acts like a gatekeeper — and what happens when that filter does not work properly.
6 min read
Getting dengue once should make you stronger against it — but sometimes a second infection hits far harder. A landmark study has now explained the immune mechanism behind this dangerous paradox, bringing scientists closer to a vaccine that works for everyone.
3 min read
Antibiotics are medicines that kill or stop the growth of bacteria, but using them incorrectly can make them stop working for everyone. This explainer covers how antibiotics work, why resistance is a growing concern, and how to use them safely.
6 min read
A fossil from Homo erectus — an ancient human relative who lived nearly 2 million years ago — has given up genetic secrets that scientists once thought were lost forever, rewriting what we know about humanity's family tree.
3 min read
Your body might carry a tiny genetic echo from a human species that vanished over 100,000 years ago — and a new protein study has found the first possible chemical evidence that ancient interbreeding really happened.
2 min read
Smaller than a grain of sand yet spinning up to 1,500 times per second, the tiny motor that powers bacteria has puzzled scientists for half a century — until now. Physicists and biologists have finally mapped how this molecular machine converts a flow of charged particles into spinning motion.
2 min read
A creature barely the size of a grain of rice is living far longer than its body size should allow — and biologists at the Max Planck Institute have found that its secret may rewrite how we understand aging in all animals.
2 min read
Every time your body fights off a virus, it uses defense systems that bacteria invented over 3 billion years ago — long before animals ever existed. Dozens of new discoveries are rewriting how scientists understand human immunity.
3 min read
Your liver performs over 500 jobs every single day, yet most people never think about it until something goes wrong — it has no pain sensors of its own, so distress shows up in surprising ways elsewhere in the body.
2 min read
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found that young stars fade in X-ray energy far more quickly than models predicted, changing what scientists know about early star behaviour.
2 min read
Researchers found evidence that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens cooperated at a site dating back 110,000 years, pushing back the known timeline of contact between the two groups.
2 min read
Researchers have proven a 67-year-old theory about how vitamin B1 moves into brain cells. The discovery could lead to better treatments for neurological diseases.
2 min read
New research suggests dogs became human companions far earlier than previously believed. Scientists analysed ancient DNA to push back the timeline of dog domestication.
2 min read
A camera dropped into the Izu-Ogasawara Trench near Japan has filmed a snailfish swimming at a depth of 8,336 metres — the deepest any fish has been seen alive.
2 min read
