Biology

Steven Strogatz and Janna Levin return for a new season on major scientific and mathematical questions of our time, with 12 all-new episodes and a new format.

Rare and powerful compounds, known as keystone molecules, can build a web of invisible interactions among species.

Physicists and marine biologists built a quantitative framework that predicts how coral polyps collectively construct a variety of coral shapes.

By screening films in a brain scanner, neuroscientists discovered a rich library of neural scripts — from a trip through an airport to a marriage proposal — that form scaffolds for memories of our experiences.

By treating DNA as a language, Brian Hie’s “ChatGPT for genomes” could pick up patterns that humans can’t see, accelerating biological design.

Under the sea ice during the Arctic’s pitch-black polar night, cells power photosynthesis on the lowest light levels ever observed in nature.

Individual cells in the brain light up for specific ideas. These concept neurons, once known as “Jennifer Aniston cells,” help us think, imagine and remember episodes from our lives.

Nanotube bridge networks grow between the most abundant photosynthetic bacteria in the oceans, suggesting that the world is far more interconnected than anyone realized.

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.