A living map of what Bluesky is talking about: the past week's conversations, grouped into topics and regions and rebuilt every six hours.

Your DNA is full of stories

The amoeba Incendiamoeba cascadensis demonstrates that eukaryotic life can withstand temperatures beyond what was thought possible and sheds light on molecular strategies for survival in extreme heat.

Nature Human Behaviour - Embryo screening and the new reproductive divide

Ancient viral warfare could be at the root of modern class 1 CRISPR bacterial defense systems

Comb jellies are helping answer fundamental questions in biology, from how the earliest nervous systems evolved to how bioluminescence works.

Fewer people are reading for pleasure, but getting lost in a good book has repeatedly been linked to substantial cognitive benefits

Scientists are probing whether language models trained on historical data can reproduce creative breakthroughs.

Large-language models (LLMs) are rapidly becoming part of human culture, reshaping how information is produced, transmitted, and used. Here we propose that their diffusion can be understood through a ...

A novel Asgard archaeon, Nerearchaeum marumarumayae, is present in microbial mats in Shark Bay, Australia. Combining genomic and structural analyses, together with high-resolution electron cryotomogra...

Sarah Demers, chair of the physics department at Yale University, sees the potential for large language models to both help and harm her field.

Lightning, leaves, and anchors

Snake embryos coil, but how and why they corkscrew remains unexplored. Weber et al. find that the embryos wind up clockwise via buckling of the rapidly elongating axial body against the slow-growing, ...

Admixture between modern humans and extinct hominins has shaped the genomes of present-day individuals, but reconstructing this history has been constrained by the scarcity of archaic samples and unad...

Geochemical clues hint that worm-like creatures in the Ediacaran period benefited from symbiosis with bacteria.

Superlative things were done in the past century by marshalling thousands of people in the service of a vision of the future

Cell biologists have long known that mechanical forces, such as tension and compression, influence tissue differentiation. Now, advanced methods are letting them observe and manipulate these forces in...

Animal chromosome homology can persist over hundreds of millions of years, despite fusions and translocations. The frequency, pace, and impact of these changes remain unclear. We develop a multiscale ...

Alt: Scene from The Jungle Book in which Bagheera tries to grab Mowgli only to have a door slammed in his face by a dressed-up Baloo.

A groundbreaking study hints at a hazy boundary between “life” and “non-life,” as well as two distinct origins of biology on Earth

Bee brain, bee bright, and the point(lessness) of (human) intelligence

Bee brain, bee bright, and the point(lessness) of (human) intelligence

The sex reversal technique could be used to help rescue endangered species, say the researchers behind the work.

It’s entirely possible that the world has heard just about enough from me. After all, I’ve written three books, I’ve been inflicting Scientist Sees Squirrel on you for over a decade, and the data w…

Neanderthals had a robust build, but the genetic basis remains unclear. Kanis et al. show that a Neanderthal growth hormone receptor variant increases cellular growth signaling and is inherited by som...

Early Cambrian Eoceras shaanxiense gen. et sp. nov. preserves septa and a segmented tube resembling a primordial siphuncle, extending cephalopod origins and revealing early assembly of chambered shells used for buoyancy regulation.

Increasing desertification now means large parts of Earth are becoming inhospitable. Can gene-edited bacteria save our planet from drying out?

For centuries, scholars have debated the etiology and evolution of writing. The most persistent concerns relate to the relationship between writing and social organization, linguistic structure, and c...

Constructing an evolutionary Bioverse for life, the universe and everything