In the earliest hours after fertilization, an embryo takes its first steps toward becoming a living organism by shedding maternal control and activating its own genetic program. This critical process, ...

Descriptions of the embryo go back at least to the time of Aristotle, but it has only been since the late 19 th century and early 20 th century that advances in experimental approaches allowed ...

Biologists have provided new insights on a longstanding puzzle in biology: How complex organisms arise from a single fertilized cell. Producing a new 'gene atlas' with 4-D imaging, the researchers ...

The discovery of a gene essential to early embryonic development sheds light on the preliminary stages of human placenta formation. A team led by scientists from the University of California San Diego ...

Study finds early-stage ectoderm cells are especially susceptible, raising questions about potential developmental risks ...

An international team of scientists led from Sweden's Karolinska Institutet has for the first time mapped all the genes that are activated in the first few days of a fertilized human egg. The study, ...

Humans are the only primates that walk on two legs. Scientists believe that their uniquely shaped pelvis, the bones that connect the spine to the legs, makes this possible. However, researchers didn’t ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. As an evolutionary biologist whose career has focused on how embryos develop in a wide variety of species over the course of ...