When Charles Darwin first proposed how evolution works in 1859, it seemed plausible. Tiny changes stack up over time, eventually leading a species to become something entirely different. Aside from ...

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

Levine and her colleagues set out to answer this question by studying fruit flies known as Drosophila melanogaster. They ...

Important, previously unrecognized genetic changes common to all ancient and modern Homo sapiens spread in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, a new study finds. After that, the same investigation ...

Professor Indraneel Mittra and his team show that DNA fragments from dying cells function as agents of horizontal gene transfer in mammalian cells. For decades, scientists have known that bacteria can ...

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute and UCL have analyzed ancient DNA from Borrelia recurrentis, a type of bacteria that causes relapsing fever, pinpointing when it evolved to spread through ...