The Shark Nursery: Uncovering the Mystery of Live Birth in Cartilaginous Fish
Viviparity, or the ability to give birth to live young, is commonly linked to mammals. However, this mode of reproduction has evolved multiple times across…
Reproductive Biology News
Bizarre Vaginal Transformations Discovered in Bomb-Sniffing Rodents
Female giant African pouched rats, used for sniffing out landmines and detecting tuberculosis, can undergo astounding reproductive organ transformations, according to a new study. Unlike…
Mosquitoes No More? New Research Could Help Control Infectious Pests
Fighting back against mosquitoes by deactivating their sperm. A recent study conducted at UC Riverside makes it likely that proteins responsible for activating mosquito sperm…
Looming Crisis: Alarming Study Shows Significant Decline in Sperm Counts Globally
Scientists have published the first meta-analysis to demonstrate declining sperm counts among men from South and Central America, Asia, and Africa. The international team was…
New Genetic Variations Discovered in Swimming Behavior of Sperm Cells
Research offers additional insights into the reproductive process. A team of scientists has discovered that the behavior of sperm cells is due, in part, to…
Scientists Grow “Synthetic” Embryo With Brain and Beating Heart – Without Eggs or Sperm
Scientists from the University of Cambridge have created model embryos from mouse stem cells that form a brain, a beating heart, and the foundations of…
Scientists Grow “Synthetic” Mouse Embryo – With Brain and Beating Heart – From Stem Cells
Scientists have created model mouse embryos from stem cells that have beating hearts, as well as the foundations for a brain and all of the…
Previous Research Said Mothers of Twins Are More Fertile – Turns Out They Are Just Lucky
Is it true that women who have twins are more fertile? While prior research concluded they are, a rigorous analysis of more than 100,000 births…
Discovery of “Yoyo” Mechanism: Turning X Chromosome “Off and On Again” Critical for Oocyte Development
Discovery of ‘yoyo’ mechanism could pave the way for generating artificial oocytes in the lab. A potential new diagnostic marker that predicts the successful and…
Clasper Appendages Discovered in Mid-Cambrian Trilobite Reveal Mating Behavior Secrets
Fossils can tell scientists a lot about an animal such as their morphology, their environment, and where to place them in the tree of life….
Reproduction and Evolution: A Fish Story With a Human Tell
Elephant sharks offer a novel perspective on how humans evolved; a new study parses some previously unexplained reproductive differences. Researchers at University of California San…
New Contraceptive Method: Trapping Sperm in Semen’s Natural Gel
A discovery that blocks the normal transition of semen from a thick gel to a liquid shows promise for development of a new form of…
Xenobots: Scientists Build the First-Ever Living Robots That Can Reproduce
AI-designed Xenobots reveal entirely new form of biological self-replication—promising for regenerative medicine. To persist, life must reproduce. Over billions of years, organisms have evolved many…
Why Do Humans Possess a Twisted Birth Canal? Unraveling an Evolutionary Puzzle
Extraordinary shape makes births more difficult, but guarantees stability. The relatively narrow human birth canal presumably evolved as a “compromise” between its abilities for parturition,…
Scientists Solve an Evolutionary Curiosity: Why a Human Egg Is 10 Million Times the Volume of a Sperm Cell
Egg and sperm cell size evolved from competition. Limited resources drove gametes to differ vastly in size and number. In most living animals, egg cells…
Species of Algae With Three Sexes Identified in Japanese River
Researchers on quest to understand how different sexes first evolved. For 30 years, University of Tokyo Associate Professor Hisayoshi Nozaki has traveled an hour west…
New Research Helps Explain the Diversity of Life and “Paradox of Sex”
New University of Arizona research finds that sexual reproduction and multicellularity drive diversity among different species. There are huge differences in species numbers among the…
How Organisms Have Evolved To Address Imbalances in Sex Chromosomes
A new study led by an Iowa State University scientist sheds light on how organisms have evolved to address imbalances in sex chromosomes. The study…
