Gold has fascinated humans for thousands of years—treasured for its beauty, rarity, and resistance to tarnish. But now, in a surprising twist, researchers have stumbled upon something no one had ever seen before: a brand-new gold compound, created entirely by accident.

Biology has always been the science of life’s mysteries, and 2024 was a year full of surprises. From microscopic organisms shaping ecosystems to discoveries about humanity’s earliest relatives, scientists revealed insights that stretch across the entire tree of life.

Imagine being handed a long string of letters—one for each amino acid in a protein—and being asked to draw the protein’s 3D shape. For decades that was one of biology’s hardest puzzles. AlphaFold changed the game in 2020 by showing how powerful machine learning

When we look at the dazzling variety of life on Earth—trees, fungi, birds, bacteria, and even ourselves—it’s hard to imagine that all of it traces back to a single starting point. And yet, biologists are convinced that every living thing today shares a common ancestor

Cells are constantly moving and changing: vesicles bud and fuse, proteins assemble and fall apart, filaments slide, and membranes reshape. If you try to image many of these processes with normal light microscopy, the motion blurs details or hides fleeting configurations.

When I first introduce evolution to my students, I often see two types of reactions: curiosity and confusion. “But sir,” someone will ask, “if evolution is slow and gradual, how did we suddenly get so many different types of animals?”