Ceroglossus ochsenii, a beetle in the family Carabidae, photographed near Cucao, Chile. Copyright 2006 David R. Maddison The Tree of Life is flourishing. The Web-based project, a massive collaboration among scientists from all over the world, is growing more "leaves" and "branches" all the time. The project is basically a genealogy of life on Earth coupled with information about the characteristics of individual species and groups of organisms.

The search for El Dorado in the Amazonian rainforest might not have yielded pots of gold, but it has led to unearthing a different type of gold mine: some of the globe's richest soil that can transform poor soil into highly fertile ground.

Editor: As a microarray analyst, I can attest that this kind of tool is totally invaluable. When you try to understand the role of a regulated gene / protein and it has 55 synonyms, manual Pubmed queries get out of hand pretty quickly...

A little over one year after the original research paper was published in Bioinformatics, PharmaDM is pleased to announce immediate availability of its new GPSDB, the Gene and Protein Synonyms DataBase.

UCLA scientists have discovered that a sex gene responsible for making embryos male and forming the testes is also produced by the brain region targeted by Parkinson's disease. Published in the Feb. 21 edition of Current Biology, the new research may explain why more men than women develop the degenerative disorder, which afflicts roughly 1 million Americans.

Leading scientists, physicians, and veterinarians are uncovering new links between land-based pollution and diseases in marine mammals, with implications for human health.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have discovered that so-called flesh-eating "Strep" bacteria use a specific enzyme to break free of the body's immune system, a finding which could potentially lead to new treatments for serious infections in human patients.

Forget the textbook story about tool use and language sparking the dramatic evolutionary growth of the human brain. Instead, imagine ancient hominid children chasing frogs. Not for fun, but for food.

The late, famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr's theory of genetic revolution , introduced in 1954, remains controversial to this day and has many detractors.