Microbial species disappearing from industrialized populations have evolved with humans over millennia and migrated worldwide with them—this may have consequences for human health.

We asked 100 scientists about unsolved problems in their fields. They sent back provocations — on the origins of life, the possibilities for human progress and much more.

Dr Ning Xu denies he broke the rules of Nikon's annual Small World In Motion contest.

An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.

Massively parallel reporter assays and human–ape hybrid skeletal cells are used to study the evolution of human cis-regulatory elements (CREs), revealing how differences in CREs have shaped the composition of human skeletal tissue.

Updated: September 22, 2026Welcome to Masters of Microscopy: The People Behind the Lens, where we showcase and celebrate the individuals at the heart of the Nikon Small World competitions. They are sc...

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Many prokaryotes are diderms. They divide using an FtsZ division ring to simultaneously constrict physically coupled inner and outer membranes to form daughter cells with two membranes. Currently, onl...

The genomic regions regulating gene expression are often themselves transcribed into a variety of noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs). However, the regulatory roles of this noncoding transcription remain largely ...

Fischer et al. uncover a fundamental mechanism of membrane fusion during nuclear pore complex (NPC) assembly. Brl1 and Brr6 form ring-shaped, membrane-remodeling complexes that interact and bridge the nuclear envelope at NPC-assembly sites to mediate fusion. This pathway is conserved in humans via the metazoan fusogen CLCC1.

How do genomes gain new functional parts? In eukaryotes, which tend to evolve under weak selection, much of the genome is junk. Palazzo and Qiu borrow the logic of Markov chains to show how non-funct...