A new study led by researchers at Yale and McGill University reveals how fluctuations in the Earth’s oxygen levels over 700 million years ago may have set the stage for the diversification of ...

Top row: co-first authors Ang Gao (left) and Krishna Shrinivas (right). Bottom row: co-senior authors Arup Chakraborty (left) and Phillip Sharp (right). A computational model developed by scientists ...

For some three billion years, unicellular organisms ruled Earth. Then, around one billion years ago, a new chapter of life began. Early attempts at team living began to stick, paving the way for the ...

Life and death are traditionally viewed as opposites. But the emergence of new multicellular life-forms from the cells of a dead organism introduces a “third state” that lies beyond the traditional ...

If you look at the world around you now - at the plants, animals, and the people around you, it's easy to take for granted our multicellular existence. Life didn't always look like this. In fact, way ...

A major event in the evolution of organisms on earth was the development of complex, multicellular life forms made of eukaryotic cells, which are thought to have come from prokaryotic cells. Studies ...

Cooperation is a classic solution to hostile environments that limit individual survival. In extreme cases this may lead to the evolution of new types of biological individuals (e.g., eusocial ...

Unicellular organisms show surprising complexity In a paper appearing in Nature Genetics, researchers discover that in more "primitive" unicellular organisms, both the adenine and the cytosine bases ...

In the multicellular soil bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor, some cells start producing lots of antibiotics after mutations delete big chunks of their genomes. Now a computer model has helped to ...

Banner image: Carl Simpson inspects a fossil of Brooksella alternata, an invertebrate animal that swam in the ocean roughly 500 million years ago. (Credit: Glenn Asakawa/CU Boulder) A new study from ...

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...