Environmental change doesn’t affect evolution in a single, predictable way. In large-scale computer simulations, scientists ...

A major evolutionary theory says most genetic changes don’t really matter, but new evidence suggests that’s not true. Researchers found that helpful mutations happen surprisingly often. The twist is ...

The origins of consciousness date back about 540 million years ago, when animal bodies became more complex. Feelings like ...

A mystery that started with the discovery of a pinkie finger bone in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia may finally have been cracked.

The discovery of an extremely metal-poor galaxy, observed thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, opens a fissure in the ...

From Viking to Perseverance, scientists have spent decades chasing chemical hints that could point to life beyond Earth.

The Milky Way was once a textbook example of how a spiral galaxy should form and evolve. Now a wave of new observations and ...

The flipside of biophobia is called biophilia, an innate affinity for nature. Both of these terms stem from evolutionary ...

Some scientific breakthroughs may be lost to time due to scandal and redaction, while others are simply a case of waiting for ...

For years, popular culture has treated a human settlement on Mars as an almost inevitable next chapter, a matter of engineering and willpower rather than fundamental limits. Astrophysicist Neil ...