Humankind’s bombs, plastics, chickens and more have altered the planet enough to usher in a new chapter in Earth’s geologic history. That’s the majority opinion of a group of 35 experts tasked with evaluating whether the current human-dominated time span, unofficially dubbed the Anthropocene, deserves a formal place in Earth’s geologic timeline alongside the Eocene […]

ORLANDO, Fla. — When sex chromosomes among common pill bugs go bad from disuse, borrowed bacterial DNA comes to the rescue. Certain pill bugs grow up female because of sex chromosomes cobbled together with genes that jumped from the bacteria. Genetic analysis traces this female-maker DNA to Wolbachia bacteria, Richard Cordaux, based at the University […]

The world’s most minuscule machines operate on the molecular level and have won their creators the 2016 Nobel Prize in chemistry. The prize is shared between Jean-Pierre Sauvage of the University of Strasbourg in France, J. Fraser Stoddart of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and Bernard Feringa of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. […]

Scaling up from one cell to many may have been a small step rather than a giant leap for early life on Earth. A single-celled organism closely related to animals controls its life cycle using a molecular toolkit much like the one animals use to give their cells different roles, scientists report October 13 in […]

To the bafflement of birders, yellow-shafted flickers (Colaptes auratus auratus) sometimes sport red or orange wing feathers. Scientists have suggested that the birds, which inhabit eastern North America, might be products of genetic variation affecting the carotenoid pigments that produce their flight-feather colors. Alternatively, the birds might be hybrids from mixing with a subspecies that […]