New plankton arrived just a few millennia — maybe even decades — after the Chicxulub asteroid, forcing a rethink of evolution ...

Survival of the fittest. Nature red in tooth and claw. The common view of natural selection is based solely on the individual: A trait allows an organism to out-compete its rivals and is thus passed ...

Men want hot women, and women want rich men. Or do they? Relationship scientist and UC Davis psychology professor Paul ...

Life’s story may stretch further back than scientists once thought. Some genes found in nearly every organism today were already duplicated before all life shared a common ancestor. By tracking these ...

When a nuclear disaster empties a landscape of people, nature doesn’t politely wait for instructions. It moves in. After the ...

The idea that six generations are battling it out in today's workplace makes for compelling headlines, but how much of it is actually true?

Every organism alive on Earth, from oak trees to octopuses to the bacteria in our gut, belongs to a single extended family. Genetic evidence points back to one ancestral cell, a last common forebear ...

Building the human story based on a few artefacts is tricky – particularly for wooden tools that don’t preserve well, or cave art that we don’t have the technology to date. Columnist Michael Marshall ...

A team of 48 astronomers from 14 countries, led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has discovered a population of dusty, star-forming galaxies at the far edges of the universe that formed ...

Like other living creatures, humans have been shaped by evolution. Over time, we have developed – and continue to develop – traits that help us survive.

For decades, scientists have believed that complex life began when two very different microbes joined forces, eventually ...