Scientists have discovered a kind of “pause button” in early human development. This biological mechanism has long been known in other mammals, but its discovery in humans could aid IVF procedures.

Our ancient past isn't always buried history. When it comes to our DNA, nearly 9% of the human genome is made up of leftover genetic material from ancient viruses (called endogenous retroviruses or ...

Gastrulation, the process where an embryo reorganizes itself from a hollow sphere into a multilayered structure, is considered a 'black box' of human development. This is because human embryos are ...

Scientists said on Monday they had taken a first step towards being able to control stem cells -- master cells that have the ability to become any kind of cell in the body. Doctors hope one day these ...

It’s still one of the biggest mysteries in science: How does a human cell — too small to see with the naked eye — divide and reproduce to ultimately become a human body made up of more than 30 ...

Human embryos undergo complex morphological and organizational changes during the post-implantation stage of development — a time that is also associated with a high frequency of embryo loss. But ...

Scientists have grown a scalable new embryo-like model that unshrouds some mysteries of early human development, including blood cell formation, or hematopoiesis—a first for the field. In an article ...

Two to three weeks after conception, an embryo faces a critical point in its development. In the stage known as gastrulation, the transformation of embryonic cells into specialized cells begins. This ...

Researchers have used stem cells to develop new human embryolike structures that model the earliest stages of fetal development so realistically that they even secrete hormones that can turn a lab ...

Every face carries a story, shaped long before birth by a quiet choreography of genes switching on and off at just the right moment. A new study suggests that part of that story reaches far back into ...

During embryonic stem cell (ESC) development, pluripotent stem cells transition from a naïve state into a primed state before they take their first steps toward a lineage commitment. Jacob Hanna, a ...