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…
Reproductive Biology
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…
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…
Scientists Discover That Mating Can Cause Epigenetic Changes That Last for 300 Generations
University of Maryland scientists discover that match matters: The right combination of parents in nematode worms can turn a gene off indefinitely. Evidence suggests that…
Uncovering the Mysteries of Milk: Using Genomic Data to Profile the Living Cells in Human Breast Milk
PhD student Sarah Nyquist applies computational methods to understudied areas of reproductive health, such as the cellular composition of breast milk. Sarah Nyquist got her…
Higher Risk of Pre-eclampsia and Hypertension in IVF Pregnancies Derived From Frozen-Thawed Embryos
A large cohort study drawn from the national IVF registry of France, which included almost 70,000 pregnancies delivered after 22 weeks gestation between 2013 and…
Purging Bad Mutations: Males Help Keep Populations Genetically Healthy
The number of males has little bearing on a population’s growth, but they are important for purging bad mutations from the population. A few males…
Sperm Evolution Becomes Supercharged Only When They Swim Inside Females
Sperm size varies dramatically among different animal species. But why is sperm size so variable when they share the same job — to fertilize eggs?…
New Hope for Infertile Men – Mice Could Hold the Secret
Male infertility affects more than 20 million men globally and is a contributing cause to around 50% of infertility in couples. Frequently, male infertility is…
Largest-Ever Effort to Artificially Inseminate Sharks – And the Occasional “Virgin Birth”
It’s a tough time to be a shark. Pollution, industrialized fishing, and climate change threaten marine life, and the populations of many top ocean predators…
