Animals sculpt the optical properties of their tissues at the nanoscale to give themselves “structural colors.” New work is piecing together how they do it. Peacocks, panther chameleons, scarlet ...

These animals prove you don't need human hands to create something remarkable. The natural world is full of amazing creatures that build incredible structures. From tiny insects to large mammals, ...

A remarkable fossil discovery in southwest China is rewriting the story of how complex animal life began, showing that many key animal groups appeared millions of years earlier than scientists once ...

The Cyclostomata is an ancient group of aquatic colonial suspension-feeders from the phylum Bryozoa. The fact that they have unique placentae has been discovered by researchers at St Petersburg ...

IT has been demonstrated both by electron ray and by ordinary and polarized light microscopy that the cellulose cell-wall of green plants has a fibrillar structure 1,2. Since bacterial cellulose ...

Bacterial biofilms contain a level of structural organisation that we thought was unique to plants and animals. Biofilms, slimy clumps of microorganisms like bacteria and fungi, were long thought to ...

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which caused the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, gains entry to the host cell by binding to the angiotensin-converting ...

Animals communicate constantly through sounds. Birds sing complex melodies, whales produce long sequences of calls, and bats emit rapid pulses that guide their navigation. For scientists, ...

Researchers have discovered geometric, hollow, ball-like structures in 80-million-year-old fossils of bizarre marine animals. Palaeobiologists Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill and Aaron Hunter identified the ...