Extremophiles are organisms that can thrive in unexpectedly hostile environments. These include bacteria and fungi growing in extremely hot, cold, nutrient-deprived, or salty environments. Experiments that purposely stress extremophiles in order to test their limits have shown that earth's tiniest cells have many survival tricks up their sleeves.

The Guinness Book of World Records is renowned for its collection of odd feats and extraordinary measurements. One of its entries may someday be a young miniature stallion named Einstein, which promises to rewrite the record as the smallest horse ever.

A hundred and fifty years ago, most biologists believed that cells were "simple" blobs of protoplasm. This made Darwinian evolution easier to accept, since all nature would have to do to make a new creature is accidentally adjust a collection of rudimentary parts from an old one.

Proteins do most of the required metabolic tasks within each of the trillions of cells in the human body. However, only about four percent of human DNA contains coded instructions that specify proteins. So what is the purpose of the remaining 96 or so percent?

According to the most prominent naturalistic theory of origins, the universe began over 13 billion years ago in a "Big Bang" that flung matter, energy, and space outward.