Biology

The signal doesn’t necessarily have to be a visible color change—the team has also experimented with temperature. A second receptor pathway in these engineered plants responds to diazinon, an insecticide that’s currently banned for…

While the Novartis trial was happening, Lustig and others were working on ways to restore hearing in genetic forms of hearing loss. In 2019, Lustig and his collaborators showed that OTOF gene therapy could be used to restore hearing in…

A tiny array of microelectrodes underneath the cells recorded electrical activity in the gel surrounding the cells, while other electrodes directly stimulated the neurons and recorded their responses. Using a fluorescent dye to visualize…

Duffy and Haworth speculate that on remote planets, communities of purple bacteria could swell in black sulfurous oceans, or spread in films around local sources of hydrogen sulfide. If they evolved into plants that could survive on…

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.On warm summer nights, green lacewings flutter around bright lanterns in backyards and at campsites. The insects, with their veil-like wings, are easily distracted from their…

The marketing campaign was a lasting success, even a century later. Last year, the global deodorant market was valued at $24 billion, and it’s on track to grow to $37 billion by the end of the decade, in part because of global warming,…

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.Scientists have come to realize that in the soil and rocks beneath our feet there lies a vast biosphere with a global volume nearly twice that of all the world’s oceans.…

This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.Parasitic, elusive, and emitting an overwhelming odor of putrefying flesh, Rafflesia—often called the corpse flower—has intrigued botanists for…

At first glance, the grit crust could seem like a routine example of what researchers call a biological soil crust, or “biocrust”—a community of coexisting bacteria, fungi, algae, and other microorganisms that caps the soil in coherent…

On a spring day in 1978, a fisherman caught a tiger shark in the lagoon surrounding Enewetak Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands in the north Pacific. That shark, along with the remains of a green sea turtle it had swallowed, wound up in…