Carl Zimmer

The vinegar worm (officially known as Caenorhabditis elegans) is about as simple as an animal can be. When this soil-dwelling ...

Feathers are like eyes or hands. They’re so complex, so impressive in their adaptations, so good at getting a job ...

When we talk about viruses, usually we focus on the suffering caused by Ebola, influenza and the like. But our ...

In the early 1970s, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, then a graduate student at Harvard, traveled to India to study Hanuman langurs, ...

Milk is not just food. The more closely scientists examine it, the more complexity they find. Along with nutrients like ...

A predator protected from other predators, the ladybug would seem to have the perfect insect life—were it not for wasps ...

Invasive species are both a fact of life and a scientific puzzle. Humans transport animals and plants thousands of miles from ...

In 2003, an army of 350 scientists and volunteers swept out across Central Park. Their mission, called a BioBlitz, was ...

There’s a unity to life. Sometimes it’s plain to see, but very often it lurks underneath a distraction of differences ...

When life emerged on Earth about 4 billion years ago, the earliest microbes had a set of basic genes that ...

Your body is home to about 100 trillion bacteria and other microbes, collectively known as your microbiome. Naturalists first became aware ...

Animals have been smelling for hundreds of millions of years, but the evolution of that sense is difficult to trace ...

Some of my friends are sporting wristbands these days that keep track of their bodies. Little computers nestled in these ...

When Meriel M. McEntagart, a geneticist at St. George’s University of London, met the family in May 2012, she suspected ...

The ability to edit genomes may offer us the ability to build and release mosquitos resistant to malaria, ending the ...

In 1900 the Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner first discovered blood types, winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for ...

Scientists can’t offer a simple, straightforward answer to why plants can get so much older than animals. But they have ...

Joshua Osborn, 14, lay in a coma at American Family Children’s Hospital in Madison, Wis. For weeks his brain had ...

For decades, scientists have wondered how our metabolism compares to that of other species. It’s been a hard question to ...

One way to learn about reproductive health is to observe how our primate cousins have babies. And a new study ...

Genomes are like books of life. But until recently, their covers were locked. Finally we can now open the books ...

The Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico is a network of chambers stretching 1,600 feet underground. The bacteria that grow on ...

Each of us carries just over 20,000 genes that encode everything from the keratin in our hair down to the ...

 In the summer of 1981, a Swedish graduate student named Svante Paabo filled a laboratory at the University of Uppsala ...

Find out how much genetic material humans share with grapes, round worms and dogs ...

Scientists can revive thousand-year dormant mosses and they're searching for viable cells that would make it possible to revive extinct ...

The X chromosome is part of the system that determines gender. Yet, despite its significance in human life, the X ...

Travel back far enough in your genealogy, and you will run into a fish. Before about 370 million years ago, ...