Features

The winding trail of environmental microplastics leads researchers to the human digestive ecosystem.

Bacteria cooperate to benefit the collective, but cheaters can rig the system. How is the balance maintained?

Synonymous mutations have long been ignored in cancer studies since they don’t affect the amino acid sequences of proteins. But research increasingly reveals that they can have disease-driving effects.

A more complete understanding of nonrandom segregation will shed light on how speciation occurs.

New techniques to quantify what lived in and on preserved animals throw light on how parasite abundance has changed over time.

Recording the pH within decaying organs for the first time, researchers come closer to understanding why some soft tissues are more likely to be preserved as fossils than others.

Noncoding RNAs and microproteins, once considered genomic noise, are turning out to be critical to the progression of some types of cancer.

Transposons may be key players in how tumors develop and spread, but they also keep cancer at bay in some circumstances.

Splitting Chinook salmon into two groups based on their DNA could aid conservation efforts. But some researchers argue that this would be a misuse of the data.

The myriad species floating atop the world’s seas, called neuston, are mysterious and understudied, complicating efforts to clean up plastic pollution.

This year’s crop of winning products features many with a clinical focus and others that represent significant advances in sequencing, single-cell analysis, and more.

Researchers race to find ecological data kept on outdated media or in dusty backroom boxes—before they’re lost forever.

Scientists studying pathogens such as Chlamydia, Legionella, and Listeria get a master class in how to control the internal workings of mammalian cells.

A decade-long, multicontinent study suggests that acoustic defense strategies are more common among moths than previously imagined.

Aberrant immune activation, the main cause of prematurity and stillbirths, could be preventable through interventions such as maternal vaccination. 

Meet the grasshopper that has reproduced asexually for a quarter of a million years—without acquiring undue numbers of harmful mutations.

Finding a creature in the wild that had been considered long gone brings hope—and quite a bit of uncertainty.

Evidence is mounting that epigenetic marks on DNA can influence future generations in a variety of ways. But how such phenomena might affect large-scale evolutionary processes is hotly debated.

Despite recent advances in the study of eukaryogenesis, much remains unresolved about the origin and evolution of the most complex domain of life.