The world’s most indestructible species — a stout, microscopic animal with four pairs of legs, known as the water bear or tardigrade — will survive until the sun dies, according to new research from Oxford University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

Tardigrade may be little but they are the toughest form of life on Earth. The water-dwelling micro-animals are known to be able to live for up to 30 years without food or water. They can endure temperatures of up to 150 degrees Celsius, the

Physicists are capitalizing on a direct connection between the largest cosmic structures and the smallest known objects to use the universe as a “cosmological collider” and investigate new physics.

The 3-D map of galaxies throughout the cosmos and the leftover radiation from the Big Bang — called the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — are the largest structures in the universe that astrophysicists observe using telescopes. Subatomic elementary particles, on the other hand, are the smallest known objects in the universe that particle physicists study using particle colliders.

On a warm afternoon in Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, John DelRosso embarked on a task that was part detective work, part tough love, and reached for his chainsaw.

He was 40 feet up in a 137-year-old maple whose thin crown and dying branches attested to the fact that it had seen better days. DelRosso pruned away dead branches, then focused his attention on living wood, cutting branches that to the layman might seem fine, but to the chief arborist’s eye bore tiny

Researchers use expensive machinery to develop ways to harness DNA as a synthetic raw material to store large amounts of digital information outside of living cells.

But what if they could coerce living cells, such as large populations of bacteria, to use their own genomes as a biological hard drive that can record information scientists could tap anytime? That approach not only could open entirely new possibilities of data storage, it could also be engineered into an effective memory device able to create a chronological record of cells’ molecular experiences during development

Scientists appear closer than ever to unlocking the black box that is the brain, and they’re doing it with the help of a fish less than half an inch long.

Led by Jeff Lichtman, the Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Santiago Ramon y Cajal Professor of Arts and Sciences, Florian Engert, a professor of molecular and cellular biology, and David Hildebrand, a postdoctoral fellow in Engert’s lab, a team of researchers

Proteins make up a wildly diverse class of molecule, with key roles in everything from catalyzing reactions to helping fight off infection to transporting oxygen through the body. Now, Harvard scientists are beginning to provide answers on drivers of that diversity.

Led by Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology, and Amy Gilson, a graduate student in Shakhnovich’s lab, investigators have found that the stability of proteins plays an important role in the evolution of