Features

Regularly taking breaks from eating—for hours or days—can trigger changes both expected, such as in metabolic dynamics and inflammation, and surprising, as in immune system function and cancer progression.

A rapid increase in the global incidence of the condition has researchers scrambling to understand the causes of the trend, and cope with the consequences.

Contamination of marine and terrestrial ecosystems by microplastics is putting individual organisms at risk.

The proteasome’s ability to target and degrade specific proteins is proving useful to researchers studying protein function or developing treatments for diseases.

Understanding how people recognize and control their own bodies could help researchers develop therapies for those who’ve lost their sense of self.

From fish harvests to cottonwood forests, organisms display evidence that species change can occur on timescales that can influence ecological processes.

Researchers unravel the sophisticated ways cancers evade treatments, including immunotherapies, designed to destroy them.

Tumors’ mutations can encode the seeds of their own destruction, in the form of immunogenic peptides recognized by T cells.

Across many diseases, taking medication at specific times of day may make the therapy more effective.

Researchers are using multiple methods to study the origins of humans’ capacity to process and produce music, and there’s no shortage of debate about the results.

Diverse species are said to sing, but music is in the ear of the beholder.

Birdsong bears a striking resemblance to human music, but it’s not yet clear that birds interpret it that way.