Tiffany Taylor, professor of microbial ecology and evolution at the University of Bath in the U.K., recommends the books that shaped her career and her outlook on life. When you purchase through links ...

Cancer doesn’t evolve by pure chaos. Scientists have developed a powerful new method that reveals the hidden rules guiding how cancer cells gain and lose whole chromosomes—massive genetic shifts that ...

Imagine a photograph of your great-grandparents, grandparents and parents side by side. You’d see a resemblance, but each generation would look distinct from its predecessors. This is the process of ...

A fish thought to be evolution’s time capsule just surprised scientists. A detailed dissection of the coelacanth — a 400-million-year-old species often called a “living fossil” — revealed that key ...

One hundred years ago a young teacher, John T. Scopes, went on trial in Dayton, Tenn., for violating a recently enacted state law that forbade the state’s educators “to teach any theory that denies ...

From “experimental archaeology” to the mysterious appeal of exploration, the wide-ranging subjects detailed in these titles captivated Smithsonian magazine’s science contributors this year Joe Spring, ...

Our species, Homo sapiens, has been evolving for more than 300,000 years, but the story of human origins starts much earlier. Since evolving from the common ancestor that we share with our closest ...

Cooking food is one of the activities that makes humanity unique. It's not just about what tastes good: advances in cooking technology have been a constant part of our progress, from the ability to ...

A new study confirms that dolphins and orcas have reached a "point of no return" in their evolution, making a return to land ...