How do living organisms that lack a brain or nerve cells make decisions? In a new study published in May 2021 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America ...

Laboratory chemists are now edging closer to the moment when lifeless molecules first organized into the chemistry that would eventually support complex organisms. By recreating key early-Earth ...

Up until recently, habituation -- a simple form of learning -- was deemed the exclusive domain of complex organisms with brains and nervous systems, such as worms, insects, birds, and mammals. But a ...

A dog learns to sit on command, a person hears and eventually tunes out the hum of a washing machine while reading … The capacity to learn and adapt is central to evolution and, indeed, survival.

Depending upon how you do the counting, there are around 9 million species on Earth, from the simplest single-celled organisms to humans. It’s reassuring to imagine that complex bodies and brains like ...

Despite being among the simplest forms of life on Earth, cyanobacteria are able to anticipate and prepare for the changing seasons based on the amount of light they are exposed to. It has been known ...

Scientists have shown that placing physical constraints on an artificially-intelligent system -- in much the same way that the human brain has to develop and operate within physical and biological ...

Scientists at Nagoya University in Japan have identified the genes that allow an organism to switch between living as single ...