Why do you have five fingers? Why not ten, or twenty, or one? Why do so many animals have five fingers? Five seems to be the perfect number for most hands. Oddly, the first vertebrates to come onto ...

My colleague and I have published a new study of cactus flowers which may help explain the conundrum. For more than a century ...

The human body is a machine whose many parts – from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain – have been assembled in fits and starts over the four billion years of our ...

An international team of researchers has developed a new theoretical framework that bridges physics and biology to provide a unified approach for understanding how complexity and evolution emerge in ...

If we look across the whole of the mammal branch of the tree of life, we find there are many groups of mammals that have ...

A new study shows cultural evolution helped humans expand across Earth far faster than genetic change alone could achieve.

Tom has a Master's degree in Journalism. His editorial work covers anything from archaeology and the environment to technology and culture. Tom has a Master's degree in Journalism. His editorial work ...

Daniel Read receives funding from the ESRC. Nobody likes to wait, and we are willing to pay to avoid it. Expedited shipping, fast food and video streaming are all profitable because they reduce or ...

Selection in Assembly Space. (A) Pictorial representation of the assembly space represents the formation of combinatorial object space from building blocks and physical constraints. (B) Observed copy ...

The human body is a machine whose many parts—from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain—have been assembled in fits and starts over the 4 billion years of our ...