Search the life sciences

4+ hour, 59+ min ago   (91+ words) Beneath the rolling tea gardens of India’s Kangra Valley, an invisible ecosystem of bacteria, fungi and archaea is hard at work, sustaining one of the world’s most beloved beverages. A new metagenomic study has now catalogued this hidden biodiversity in…...

5+ hour, 36+ min ago   (687+ words) Deep inside the developing human body, an ancient cellular recycling system appears to be hard at work long before a baby takes its first breath. Autophagy, the conserved lysosomal degradation pathway that cells use to clear damaged components and remodel…...

5+ hour, 42+ min ago   (615+ words) For the first time, scientists have watched individual nerve fibers die and regrow inside a living mammal, day after day, through the same tiny window....

5+ hour, 42+ min ago   (597+ words) When a cell faces heat, toxins, viral attack, or DNA damage, it does something remarkable: it stops translating most of its messenger RNA and gathers the stalled transcripts into dense, membraneless droplets known as stress granules....

6+ hour, 5+ min ago   (712+ words) Plants cannot run from their enemies, so they fight with chemistry. The mustard family, Brassicaceae, is famous for the pungent sulfur compounds that give mustard, cabbage, and wasabi their bite, but those well-known defenses are only the visible tip of…...

6+ hour, 39+ min ago   (92+ words) Some seeds refuse to die. Date palm seeds recovered from Herod’s Palace near Jerusalem, roughly 2,000 years old, have been coaxed back to life and grown into viable trees. Sacred lotus seeds from northeastern China have germinated after approximately 1,300 years of…...

7+ hour, 22+ min ago   (74+ words) DNA methylation has become one of the hottest targets in modern biomedicine. The chemical tags that adorn cytosine bases shape everything from ageing and cancer to cardiovascular disease and forensic age estimation, and researchers have spent decades building tools to…...