Flying squirrels, sugar gliders and bats haven’t had a common ancestor in 160 million years, but they form their wing flaps using some of the same genetic ingredients.

That’s the intriguing finding from a Princeton-led team of biologists, detailed recently in the journal Science Advances. In other words, when the seven known flying…

Scientists have never known precisely how much energy a cancerous tumor expends growing in the mammalian body.

They hypothesized that it consumes a great deal of energy, churning through nutrients and putting healthy tissue – the heart, the liver, the pancreas – at a disadvantage as the metabolic system spreads the nutritive…

When a friend asked Kristina Olson how to support their young child — who heard “It’s a boy!” at birth but who was now saying “I’m a girl” — Olson thought, “I’m a developmental psychologist. I’ll read the literature, and then I can tell her what it says.”

But she quickly discovered that there were no papers in the peer-reviewed…

A new study shows that social isolation changes the behavior and brain development of bumblebees, but not in the way researchers expected.

The study explored how bumblebees, which depend largely on their social instincts for survival, were impacted by being socially isolated during a key developmental period.

The researchers…

A tortoise from a Galápagos species long believed extinct has been found alive and now confirmed to be a living member of the species. The tortoise, named Fernanda after her Fernandina Island home, is the first of her species identified in more than a century.

The Fernandina Island Galápagos giant tortoise (Chelonoidis phantasticus

Researchers used computer modeling to identify the features that green algae use to enhance carbon usage, providing a blueprint for engineering this approach into crop plants. 

Organisms such as plants, mammals and insects undergo a carefully orchestrated developmental program as they transition from single-celled embryos to their multicellular adult forms. In a paper that appeared May 4, 2022 in the journal Nature, researchers at

In April 2020, as microbiologist Cameron Myhrvold had just finished his second interview to join Princeton’s faculty, his paper was published in Nature introducing the revolutionary CARMEN system that simultaneously tests for the 170 most prevalent human-infecting viruses — including the then-novel coronavirus. At the time, only 39 of those…

Some of Princeton’s leading cancer researchers were startled to discover that what they thought was a straightforward investigation into how cancer spreads through the body — metastasis — turned up evidence of liquid-liquid phase separations: the new field of biology research that investigates how liquid blobs of living materials merge into…

COVID-19 can be thought of as a game of chicken, except instead of driving head-on towards each other and betting the other person will swerve at the last minute, we’re going out when we should be staying home and foregoing social distancing, masks and hygiene measures.

“If we can rely on other people to follow the rules, we can get…