James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

How small a canvas can evolution work on? Scientists have experimented with a synthetic lifeform designed to have the simplest possible genome, and found that given the chance it can evolve lost ...

More than 500 million years ago, single-celled organisms on Earth’s surface began forming multi-cellular clusters that ultimately became plants and animals. Just how that happened is a question that ...

It’s a crazy world out there, and if an organism wants to survive, it had better have the right tools for the job. From anteaters to chameleons, animals have gained some pretty useful features over ...

Scientists uncovered how whole-genome duplication emerges and remains stable over thousands of generations of evolution in the lab. Sometimes, the most significant scientific discoveries happen by ...

A team led by scientists at UC San Diego report in the November issue of Nature Genetics rapid evolutionary changes in a bacterial genome, observed in near-real time over a few days. Scientists have ...

Evolved macroscopic "snowflake" yeast from the MuLTEE experiment. The large size of the nuclei (yellow) and cells (cyan) are results of whole-genome duplication and aneuploidy. Sometimes, the most ...