Why do you have five fingers? Why not ten, or twenty, or one? Why do so many animals have five fingers? Five seems to be the perfect number for most hands. Oddly, the first vertebrates to come onto ...

Hidden within fish DNA are powerful genetic twists that may explain one of nature’s biggest mysteries: how new species form so quickly. In Lake Malawi, hundreds of cichlid fish species evolved at ...

The fossil find suggests that the closest ancestors to modern apes may have emerged in northern Africa rather than what was ...

My colleague and I have published a new study of cactus flowers which may help explain the conundrum. For more than a century ...

An international team of researchers has developed a new theoretical framework that bridges physics and biology to provide a unified approach for understanding how complexity and evolution emerge in ...

A new study shows cultural evolution helped humans expand across Earth far faster than genetic change alone could achieve.

Tom has a Master's degree in Journalism. His editorial work covers anything from archaeology and the environment to technology and culture. Tom has a Master's degree in Journalism. His editorial work ...

If we look across the whole of the mammal branch of the tree of life, we find there are many groups of mammals that have ...

The human body is a machine whose many parts – from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain – have been assembled in fits and starts over the four billion years of our ...

Daniel Read receives funding from the ESRC. Nobody likes to wait, and we are willing to pay to avoid it. Expedited shipping, fast food and video streaming are all profitable because they reduce or ...