How Do Cuttlefish Hide? Scientists Search for the Secret to Camouflage.
Cephalopods are masters of camouflage. Scientists want to decipher how the process works in the brain.
biology
Mosquitoes are a choice - Works in Progress Magazine
The Evolutionary Raw Deal of the Human Knee - Nautilus
Why don’t great apes have knee problems?
The Evolving Quest to Build Life in a Lab
Scientists want to create cells from scratch, to unveil life's origins or provide specialized functions. Are they close?
Why is the human body so crap except for the liver?
the question everyone is asking
Silicon Should Have Won the Contest for Life. So Why Are You Made of Carbon?
Earth is overflowing with silicon. Carbon is comparatively scarce. Yet every living thing we have ever discovered is built around carbon, and the reason reaches from the sand beneath your feet to a st
He Changed the World of Organ Transplants. Would He Die Waiting for His Own?
A New York transplant surgeon’s experience waiting for a heart transplant laid bare the challenges of a system he had spent decades trying to fix.
Elastic fantastic: The deadly fluid of pitcher plants
Flies check in, but they don’t check out, thanks to liquid laced with stretchy sugars that keep them tangled up
The Quest for Universal Flu Vaccines
Modern flu vaccines have an average efficacy of just 40 percent, and they must be revamped each year. How can we make vaccines that are “universal” — both broadly-protective and highly potent?
influenza evolves so quickly that a novel virus emerges each flu season
inactivate viruses with formaldehyde
The Next Gene-Editing Technology May Also Be the Oldest
Scientists have discovered a powerful gene-targeting system in viruses. Billions of years old, VIPR seems to predate CRISPR and may be even more powerful.
The Bone-Marrow-Transplant Revolution
Finding a matched donor has always been the major challenge. A drug has solved that problem.
The kill switch for harmful genes - Works in Progress Magazine
What if instead of editing a gene, or blocking the protein it produces, you could simply switch it off?
The Quest For Caffeine You Can Have At Night
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The Horseshoe crab, vampirism and medical engineering
Are Memories Transferable — or Edible? | Quanta Magazine
In the 1960s, worm-training experiments and their strange implications captivated the nation. Columnist Claire L. Evans follows the neuroscientists who attempted to recapture the magic.
In the 1960s, an eccentric behavioral psychologist named James McConnell convinced the scientific establishment that planarian worms, like Pavlov’s dogs, could be classically conditioned — and that memories of this training could be transferred from worm to worm through cannibalism. These bizarre…
The upper limits of biology
The limits of breeding for speed
The Nasty Slime That Scientists Can't Stop Studying
The slime inside okra is one of the most useful substances researchers have found in any plant on Earth.
The Humble Amoeba Is Smarter Than You Think
The Humble Amoeba Is Smarter Than You Think: A conversation with Nicholas Money, mycologist and author of A is for Amoeba
Some useful equations for biological processes | R-bloggers
Biological phenomena are often studied by examining how a numerical variable, usually called the response (e.g., the weight or height of an organism), is affected by another variable, usually called the predictor (e.g., time or fertiliser applic...
A strange transmissible cancer is spreading through the catfish in this lake
For more than a decade, there's been something fishy going on in a lake that straddles Vermont and the province of Quebec. It involves cancer, a kind of catfish, and — possibly — clues about how tumors metastasize.
The Strange Blissfulness of Storms - Nautilus
Is there a biochemical reason that extreme weather makes us happy?
Biological Evolution and Information Acquisition
A few weeks ago we looked at a simulation of technological evolution by economist Brian Arthur, in which he was able to start with simple building blocks (such as a NAND gate) and evolve surprisingly complex circuits (such as a 12-way AND gate or a 4-bit adder) by randomly…
What’s the Future of Gene Editing? | Quanta Magazine
In the first episode of the new season of ‘The Joy of Why,’ Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna discusses how she discovered CRISPR’s genome-editing power, the breakthroughs and hurdles during its explosive growth, and what lies ahead for this groundbreaking technology.
The blood cancer that became solvable - Works in Progress Magazine
Multiple myeloma is brutal. We may finally have a cure, but American regulatory inertia means that it was discovered abroad.
Laron syndrome: The dwarfism that protects against cancer and diabetes
How resistance to growth hormone creates extraordinary disease resistance
How we learned what genes are made of
In the 1940s, scientists made a discovery now fundamental to biology: genes are encoded in DNA. The story involves bacteria, dead mice, and a kitchen cream separator.
Synthesize Realistic 3D Medical Images at Scale to Ship Pre‑Trained Models | NVIDIA Technical Blog
High‑quality 3D medical imaging data is the foundation of modern radiology AI, but access to it is often constrained by data scarcity, privacy restrictions…
The biggest mystery in neuroscience, according to me. Worm brain simulation
Sixty years later and we still can't solve it
Routine vaccines may cut dementia risk—experts have startling hypothesis on how - Ars Technica
Vaccines may be training a part of our immune system long thought to be untrainable.
Mirror Life’s Doomsday Potential
Scientists working on synthetic “mirror life” have come to realize that, if created, it could pose an existential threat to life on Earth.
Mirror life would be the genesis of an organism that does not imitate nature but contradicts it. It would have a molecular structure opposite to that of all existing life on Earth. It would be something completely new under the sun, and its creation would commence the beginning of a second tree of…
How the Bird Eye Was Pushed to an Evolutionary Extreme | Quanta Magazine
The bird retina is one of the most energetically expensive tissues in the animal kingdom, yet it doesn’t use the energy advantage of oxygen. New research finally explains how this is possible.
The DNA Fix for Aging
Everyone’s DNA keeps mutating. Could correcting those errors lead to longevity?
Scientists Are Finally Unlocking a Cancer Treatment’s Full Potential
CAR-T cell therapy, originally developed for cancer, is showing ever more promise as a treatment for autoimmune diseases.
Scientists built a tickle robot to solve one of biology’s strangest mysteries
Tickling may be evolutionarily ancient and recognized across cultures, but science has only scratched the surface of this topic
The “Sour” History of Scurvy, the Disease That Decimated the World’s Greatest Navies
The bane of sailors for centuries, scurvy is a disease that has caused immense suffering, even to the present day.
How Φ80 Infiltrates Research Labs
While some bacteriophages play vital roles in laboratory research, others are bent on sabotage.
How to Design Antibodies
A step-by-step guide to making de novo binders.
A Visual Guide to DNA Sequencing
How to “read” nucleic acids, from Sanger to nanopores.
Saving The Life We Cannot See
Conservation has traditionally ignored the planet's smallest life forms. Microbiologists are trying to change that — before it's too late. Microbes make life on Earth possible, yet human activity is wiping these microbiomes out — and science is only beginning to grasp the…
Learning about longevity from long-lived animals
The secrets to extending human lifespans might lie in the animals that can already live for centuries.
Saving the Venus Flytrap: How One Woman Rallied a Town Around Its Weirdest Attraction – Garden & Gun
Despite their outsize hold on popular imagination, Venus flytraps are native to a tiny corner of the globe: the Coastal Plain of the Carolinas. As development threatens, one town—spurred on by one tireless botanist—has taken up the shovel to save the world’s most fascinating…
A Cell So Minimal That It Challenges Definitions of Life | Quanta Magazine
The newly described microbe represents a world of parasitic, intercellular biodiversity only beginning to be revealed by genome sequencing.
Atomic-Scale Protein Filters
How aquaporin and potassium channels filter hundreds of millions of water molecules or ions each second, by positioning the correct amino acid in the perfect place.
Two billion humans are doing something bizarre right now: sleeping | Aeon Essays
It is our biggest blind spot, a bizarre experience that befalls us every day, and can’t be explained by our need for rest
Miller–Urey experiment - Wikipedia
He Was Expected to Get Alzheimer’s 25 Years Ago. Why Hasn’t He?
Scientists are searching for the secret in Doug Whitney’s biology that has protected him from dementia, hoping it could lead to ways to treat or prevent Alzheimer’s for many other people.
The natural clocks that can pinpoint someone's time of death
When something dies, a telltale radioactive signal ticks like a natural clock. Discovering it helped us solve all sorts of natural mysteries.
The World’s Most Common Surgery
In 4,000 years, cataract surgery went from a crude procedure involving thorn instruments to a 20-minute operation with a 95 percent clinical success rate. The next step is broadening access.
Mary Roach’s New Book Replaceable You Explores Challenges in Replacing Body Parts
Mary Roach unpacks the millennia-long effort to replace failing body parts—and the reasons that modern medicine still struggles to match the original designs.
The Most Mysterious Cells in Our Bodies Don’t Belong to Us
You carry literal pieces of your mom—and maybe your grandma, and your siblings, and your aunts and uncles.