Since the catastrophic pandemics of the Middle Ages, one disease has almost proverbially symbolized contagion and death: the plague. It is now known that the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis has been present in Central and Northern Europe for more than 5,000 years. However, it is still uncertain whether it also led to pandemics and mass deaths in its early forms ..read more

Contemporary life is rife with talk of impending apocalypse, from the plots of countless books and movies to the increasingly grim predictions associated with climate change ..read more

A study has shown that a type of non-coding RNA molecule could play a role in the development of skin diseases—like eczema or psoriasis—and highlights an important molecular mechanism for driving genetic evolution ..read more

Islands drive language change and generate language diversity in similar ways to how they drive species diversity, according to research from The Australian National University (ANU) that analyzed languages from over 13,000 inhabited islands. The research is published in Nature Ecology & Evolution ..read more

Thermogenesis is a process by which organisms generate internal heat. Although it is usually associated with animals, some plants have also developed this ability. This metabolic process allows certain parts of the plant, such as flowers and inflorescences, to raise their temperature above that of the surrounding environment ..read more

If you've ever seen a dolphin swim, you may have wondered why they undulate their bodies up and down when swimming, instead of side to side as fishes do. Though they have a fishlike body, cetaceans (a group comprised of whales, dolphins, and porpoises) are mammals that descended from land-dwelling ancestors—same as cats, dogs, mice, elephants, cows, and humans ..read more

Over the past 12,000 years, humans in Europe have dramatically increased their ability to digest carbohydrates, expanding the number of genes they have for enzymes that break down starch from an average of eight to more than 11, according to a new study by researchers from the U.S., Italy and United Kingdom ..read more

Max Planck scientists in Marburg have used a synthetic microbial community to study the gradual evolution of mutualism. The study demonstrates for the first time in detail how an evolutionary loss of independence can occur in communities of different groups of organisms. Their study is published in Nature Communications ..read more

A Danish amber collector's find upon a wild North Sea shore in the 1960's has proved to be of great and surprising significance. After having thoroughly examined the roughly 40-million-year-old piece of amber, University of Copenhagen researchers have discovered it to contain the first fossil of a predatory fungus gnat belonging to a rare genus. The research contributes new knowledge about the distribution of the gnat species and about biodiversity across space and time ..read more

The surprising discovery of a bacterium in a marine sponge from the Great Barrier Reef with striking similarity to Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the pathogen responsible for tuberculosis (TB), could unlock and inform future TB research and treatment strategies. TB remains one of the world's deadliest infectious diseases, yet the origins of M. tuberculosis are still not fully understood ..read more