Biologists group animals with similar traits into broad categories called orders. Despite their similarities, animal species in the same order can have very different average lifespans. One of the ...

“Where are all the genetic cures?” asks Denis Noble, a frustrated biophysicist, Royal Society fellow and pioneer of the field of systems biology. “They don’t exist. Where will they be? They won’t ...

Shawn W. Cloonan serves as Life Science Lead & General Counsel of McCord Development, Inc., where he oversees all legal aspects of the firm, advises on strategic development projects, and leads McCord ...

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 ...

Humanity may not be extraordinary but rather the natural evolutionary outcome for our planet and likely others, according to a new model for how intelligent life developed on Earth. The model, which ...

Systems-level thinking has transformed how we study life across scales, from molecules and cells to populations, communities ...

A new study from the University of Michigan suggests that organisms could get better at evolving over time. Researchers used a computer program to simulate organisms switching between beneficial and ...

The evolution of humans on Earth may not be entirely exceptional. That is because intelligent life is likely to form if certain planetary conditions are met, a new study suggests. This idea displaces ...