Just like every other creature, bacteria have evolved creative ways of getting around. Sometimes this is easy, like swimming ...

Microbes from a remote bay in Western Australia seem to connect to each other with tiny tubes, forming a relationship that may reflect an early step in the evolution of complex life. In Shark Bay, or ...

Evolution was fueled by endosymbiosis, cellular alliances in which one microbe makes a permanent home inside another. For the first time, biologists made it happen in the lab. Far from being solo ...

The clearest picture yet of our “last universal common ancestor” suggests it was a relatively complex organism living 4.2 billion years ago, a time long considered too harsh for life to flourish. If ...

Drugs that act against bacteria are mainly assessed based on how well they inhibit bacterial growth under laboratory conditions. A critical factor, however, is whether the active substances actually ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Far from being solo operators, most single-celled microbes are in complex relationships. In the ocean, the soil, and your gut, they ...