Cellular & Microscopic Biology

Are you the first to complain when it's too hot or too cold at work? Extremophiles have news for you: Suck it up. These hardy microbes make most of us humans seem like whimpering Goldilocks, and studying them may tell us more than you might imagine.

By Jacob Silverman & Desiree Bowie

Yep, fungi are all around us — in the grocery store, in the woods or living on your discolored toenail. And fungi can break down almost anything.

By Jesslyn Shields

No life, except possibly very small bacteria, would exist on Earth without photosynthesis.

By Jesslyn Shields

Blood transfusions are required in the U.S. every two seconds. That's why the research from the Withers Lab, which converted Type A blood to universal donor blood using bacteria, is so groundbreaking.

By John Donovan

Chloroplasts are where some of the most miraculous chemistry on Earth goes down.

By Jesslyn Shields

You could be excused for thinking that, of course, all animals breathe oxygen to live. Because it wasn't until very recently that scientists discovered the only multicellular animal that doesn't. Meet Henneguya salminicola.

By Jesslyn Shields

A single-celled algae, barely visible to the eye, plankton contributes to some of the world's most important resources and is essential to the food chain that supports all life.

By Stephanie Vermillion

Prokaryotic cells are like single-room efficiency apartments while eukaryotic cells are like mansions with many rooms — and they are the only two kinds of cells in the world.

By Jesslyn Shields

The part of your cells that helps you recover from a hangover is shaped like a maze of tubes and is made of two parts — the rough endoplasmic reticulum and the smooth endoplasmic reticulum.

By Jesslyn Shields

Centrioles are spindles that create the pathways for chromosomes to follow during cell division.

By Jesslyn Shields

Niels Bohr proposed the model of the atom that we still learn in school today, even though it's technically incorrect.

By Jesslyn Shields

Mold is a type of fungus, and it's everywhere — indoors, outdoors and even in the air. But is black mold worse than the rest?

By Melanie Radzicki McManus

While plant and animal cells are strikingly similar, the main difference between them is that plant cells are able to create their own food and animal cells cannot.

By Jesslyn Shields

When an electron loses its partner, it creates a free radical. So is that free radical now potentially hazardous to your health?

By Michelle Konstantinovsky

Viruses need hosts to replicate and reproduce. So if a virus has no host, how long can it survive? It depends on a lot of factors.

By Carrie Whitney, Ph.D.

Scientists started an experiment back in 2014 that will run for 500 years. The first results were recently published. So, what have they found so far?

By Nathan Chandler

Biofilms form when single microorganisms attach to a hydrated surface and undergo a "lifestyle switch." But why should we care about biofilms?

By Marianne Spoon

The mass of microorganisms swarming inside your favorite elite athlete's body may be a great business opportunity.

By Amanda Onion

It's all connected! Recent rodent research suggests that immune responses and social behavior may be more intertwined than we realized.

By Julia Layton

Dust traveling over the Atlantic from North Africa feeds both phytoplankton that makes the oxygen we breath and the bacteria that could kill us.

By Jesslyn Shields

While HeLa cells have been star players in medical research for decades, the woman behind them remained in the shadows for years. Discover the amazing story of Henrietta Lacks and her immortal cells in this article.

By Shanna Freeman

This stunning sight is totally natural and totally cool.

By Tara Yarlagadda

While researchers can't say from this small study whether hairy men are inherently germier than the rest of the human race, the results are startling.

By Michelle Konstantinovsky

Trees? Fungus? Bacteria? It all kind of depends on how you define "alive" ... and how you define "thing," as this BrainStuff video explains.

By Laurie L. Dove

Researchers are calling for a new "Noah's Ark" to store microbes that might one day be valuable.

By Chris Opfer