The appeal of many floral scents to humans is a fortunate byproduct: We were not even around when they appeared. And, for all the effort, commercial perfumes rarely smell like flowers.…

The good thing about studying rats is you don’t have to travel very far. Fordham University evolutionary biologist Jason Munshi-South studies biodiversity and evolution right here…

Race does not stand up scientifically, period. To begin with, if race categories were meant primarily to capture differences in genetics, they are doing an abysmal job. The genetic…

When Dalton Conley, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, talks about race, his authority is based on more than academic research. Every day he straddled the lines of race…

Every time he bent over a freshly dead body, pathologist George Martin pondered the diversity before him. Although his cadavers almost always belonged to the elderly, they varied dramatically.…

During the outbreak of the Ebola virus in West Africa in 2014, Pardis Sabeti led a team that sequenced virus genomes from infected patients, determining that the disease had most likely…

It’s hard to tell precisely how big a role biotechnology plays in our economy, because it infiltrates so many parts of it. Genetically modified organisms such as microbes and plants…

In 1994, a Swiss biologist named Pascal Gagneux began a Ph.D. program in zoology. His research plan was to stalk populations of wild chimpanzees in Cote d’Ivoire and Mali. Specifically,…

Siddhartha Mukherjee feels his science deeply. As much as any contemporary science writer, he reminds us that the actors, subjects, and interpreters of science are human beings. His…

Anyone who doubts that genes can specify identity might well have arrived from another planet and failed to notice that the humans come in two fundamental variants: male and female.…