Heredity: Inheritance and Variation of Traits

  1. Animals

    A new drug mix helps frogs regrow amputated legs

    The treatment helped frogs grow working limbs useful for swimming, standing and kicking. It’ll be a while before people can do that.

    By
  2. Health & Medicine

    Gender-affirming care improves the mental health of transgender youth

    Several states have tried to restrict access to gender-affirming health care for transgender youth. That goes against medical guidelines.

    By
  3. Animals

    Will the woolly mammoth return?

    Scientists are using genetic engineering and cloning to try to bring back extinct species or save endangered ones. Here’s how and why.

    By
  4. Animals

    Cloning boosts endangered black-footed ferrets

    A cloned ferret named Elizabeth Ann brings genetic diversity to a species that nearly went extinct in the 1980s.

    By
  5. Archaeology

    A medieval grave may have held a powerful nonbinary person

    A 1,000-year-old grave in Finland, once thought to hold a respected woman warrior, may belong to someone who didn’t have a strictly male or female identity.

    By
  6. Microbes

    Explainer: Virus variants and strains

    When viruses become more infectious or better able to survive the body’s immune system, they become a type of variant known as a strain.

    By
  7. Health & Medicine

    COVID-19 can infect kids — and risks sickening some severely

    Not all are equally impacted. Even among supposedly low risk groups, concerns intensify as the super-contagious delta variant sweeps across the globe.

    By
  8. Plants

    How Romanesco cauliflower grows spiraling fractal cones

    By tweaking just three genes in a common lab plant, scientists have mimicked one of nature’s most impressive mathematical patterns.

    By
  9. Genetics

    Just a tiny share of the DNA in us is unique to humans

    Some of these tweaks to DNA, however, may have played a role in brain evolution.

    By
  10. Health & Medicine

    One key change may have helped the coronavirus become a global menace

    One key mutation may have helped the virus behind COVID-19 better infect human cells.

    By
  11. Life

    These rabbits can’t hop. A gene defect makes them do handstands

    Mutations in a gene that helps nerve cells work properly rob rabbits of their ability to hop. Instead, the animals use their front paws to move.

    By
  12. Animals

    Science and Indigenous history team up to help spirit bears

    When scientists and Indigenous people work together, their efforts can benefit bears and people.

    By