Gut bacteria that help the Japanese digest seaweed appears to have coopted genes from marine bacteria in the coastal oceans.
Humans are spectacularly bad with thinking about the Monty Hall problem and perform worse than pigeons.
There could be a fourth species of human to have occupied the earth as recently as 30,000 years ago.
Some plants have evolved toilets in an effort to gather nitrogen.
Bacteria from our skins linger on the things we touch and they could act as a sort of living fingerprint.
Unlike mammals, individual chicken cells apparently "know" which sex they are at the time of fertilization and they maintain their own male or female identities throughout life.
Just under 3.3 million bacterial genes have been uncovered from the human gut, more than 150 times as many as reside in the entire human genome.
The brain adjusts the speed of signals through neurons so that signals from the left and right ears arrive at about the same time.
Comparisons among 776 mammal species indicate that tree-dwelling animals have longer lifespans.
Whiptail lizards manage to get away with asexual reproduction by doubling their number of chromosomes.
