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What’s the Future of Gene Editing?

June 11, 2026

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.

How Ecotypes Harbor the Genetic Memory of a Species’ Past

May 21, 2026

Evolutionary biologists are uncovering genomic mechanisms that allow populations to adapt quickly to different, hyperlocal habitats without splitting into new species.

How Dad’s Fitness May Be Packaged and Passed Down in Sperm RNA

December 22, 2025

Research into how a father’s choices — such as diet, exercise, stress, nicotine use — may transfer traits to his children has become impossible to ignore.

A Cell So Minimal That It Challenges Definitions of Life

November 24, 2025

The newly described microbe represents a world of parasitic, intercellular biodiversity only beginning to be revealed by genome sequencing.

The Poetry Fan Who Taught an LLM to Read and Write DNA

February 5, 2025

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

All Life on Earth Today Descended From a Single Cell. Meet LUCA.

November 20, 2024

The clearest picture yet of our “last universal common ancestor” suggests it was a relatively complex organism living 4.2 billion years ago, a time long considered too harsh for life to flourish.

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He’s Gleaning the Design Rules of Life to Re-Create It

November 4, 2024

Yizhi “Patrick” Cai is coordinating a global effort to write a complete synthetic yeast genome. If he succeeds, the resulting cell will be the artificial life most closely related to humans to date.

The Mystery of the Missing Multicellular Prokaryotes

May 2, 2024

Why have bacteria never evolved complex multicellularity? A new hypothesis suggests that it could come down to how prokaryotic genomes respond to a small population size.

Viruses Finally Reveal Their Complex Social Life

April 11, 2024

New research has uncovered a social world of viruses full of cheating, cooperation and other intrigues, suggesting that viruses make sense only as members of a community.