Group Selection Was Debated For Decades. A New Review Says The Empirical Case Is Far Stronger Than Critics Claimed. In A Nutshell A new review of nearly 3,000 scientific papers found 280 studies ...

Scientists Discover a New Form of Life Standing 26 Feet Tall ...

Scientists at Nagoya University in Japan have identified the genes that allow an organism to switch between living as single cells and forming multicellular structures. This ability to alternate ...

This important study fills an gap in our knowledge of the evolution of GPCRs in holozoans, as well as the phylogeny of associated signaling pathway components such as G proteins, GRKs, and RIC8 ...

Animals, from worms and sponges to jellyfish and whales, contain anywhere from a few thousand to tens of trillions of nearly genetically identical cells. Depending on the organism, these cells arrange ...

Archaea are tiny, single-celled organisms often confused with bacteria. They live everywhere – from inside salty lakes to down our own guts – and yet, they rarely get the attention they deserve.

That's why the scientists think their Stentor model precedes other models of early multicellularity (which is believed to have evolved at least 25 times in different lineages). "This is earlier, much ...

Stentor coeruleus is a giant unicellular, filter-feeding protist that uses the coordinated motion of its oral ciliary structure to generate feeding currents. These currents allow the organism to ...

A new study published in Science Advances reveals evidence of electrical signaling and coordinated behavior in choanoflagellates, the closest living relatives of animals. This elaborate example of ...

To understand the origins of multicelled life, researchers are studying a motley assortment of simpler animal relatives. The commonalities they’re unearthing offer a trove of clues about our mutual ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Once upon a time, long ago, the world was encased in ice. That’s the tale told by sedimentary rock in the tropics, many geologists ...