Molecular & Cellular Biology

If you eat junk for too long, the damage to your gut might be permanent—even if you switch to salads later.

Scientists built a type of bacteria that can actually 'learn' how to play Tic-Tac-Toe by saving its memories in its own DNA.

We’re one step closer to hypoallergenic cats—researchers just used CRISPR to delete the stuff that makes people sneeze.

Scientists went 1,000 meters down into a cave and found weird microbes with 'dark' DNA that we’ve never seen before.

Math says that being a jerk to your own family can actually be a smart move for survival if you're in a group with few kids.

The oils that make thyme smell good also act as a heat shield to keep the plant from dying in heatwaves.

Fancy bird feathers might have evolved just to prove to females that a male is a loyal dad.

When a mom holds her preemie skin-to-skin, their brain waves actually start syncing up in real-time.

In big groups, bacteria that usually fight each other for food can suddenly flip a switch and start helping each other out.

There's a marine parasite that 'reprograms' male hermit crabs to grow female body parts just so they can baby-sit its offspring.

That whole 'earthworm apocalypse' everyone was worried about in the UK? Turns out it was probably just a huge math error.

A species can be legally 'saved' from extinction even if its DNA is still quietly falling apart in the background.

It turns out some proteins are literally tied in knots just to make sure they never accidentally unfold.

We found a parasite where the entire DNA strand acts like a docking station for cell division, rather than just one spot.

If you mess with a baby bee's gut bacteria, its brain never actually develops a biological clock.

We always thought aggressive childhood cancers were there from birth, but it turns out they don't even start growing until after infancy.

Hawkmoths guide their long tongues to flowers using "eye-hand" coordination, just like you use your eyes to guide your hands.

How much a mother aphid walks around literally decides whether her babies are born with wings or not.

Your brain actually syncs up more strongly with the voices of people you don't trust. Weird, right?

You can chop a flatworm into pieces, and the new ones will still "remember" which genes were turned off in the original.

A famous cancer protein actually clumps together just like in Alzheimer's, but it does it to act as a "self-destruct" button for tumors.

Scientists used ultrasound to "hack" the brains of newbies and make them look like expert meditators in just two weeks.

Everything we thought we knew about where thyroid cells come from was wrong, solving a massive mystery in how mammals evolved.

DNA doesn't just float around in your cells—it actually moves in perfectly timed "waves" across your chromosomes.

Tumors can kill you by basically forcing your gut bacteria to break out and invade the rest of your body.

If you play certain sounds while someone is sleeping, they’ll actually be more decisive about tough choices the next day.

That 30-year-old idea that dieting makes you live longer might be completely wrong.

Giving your inner ear a tiny zap of electricity while you sleep can actually trigger a lucid dream.

Plants don't follow a complex master plan to grow branches—they basically just flip a coin every time.

There’s a mathematical law that dictates the exact geometric shape of the "Tree of Life" for every living thing on Earth.

A new theory says Neanderthals weren't a separate group that split off early—they were actually formed by modern humans moving around 300,000 years ago.

In some lakes, viruses are the ones deciding if a bacteria colony actually acts its size, breaking all the usual rules of ecology.

We finally found the "secret door" that a common childhood virus uses to sneak into human cells.

A deadly, drug-resistant fungus has reached Antarctica, and it's evolving at hyper-speed thanks to some "mutator" genes.

We found a way to film a single molecule for over 24 hours straight without it "fading out" like they usually do.

Your immune cells don't just pick the stickiest antibodies—they actually "tug" on them to see which ones are the strongest.

Even the best AI is getting it wrong—AlphaFold is dreaming up protein structures that literally break the laws of chemistry.