Today, she uses the field’s modern tools to try to make life in the lab—and she recently made a breakthrough: In July, she announced that she had built a synthetic cell she dubbed SpudCell. It can ...

Jonathan the giant tortoise was born when Darwin was still a young man. Youthful gene activity may account for his exceptionally long life. Getting a DNA sample is simple. Rub a Q-tip a few times ...

Genetic mutations cause cancer. This idea has long driven strategies that aim to lower risk or determine when to look for early signs of disease. Don’t smoke. Minimize alcohol. Get vaccinated against ...

Brain scans contain clues about what someone is looking at, but turning those signals back into recognizable images is difficult. Now, researchers in Israel have built an AI system that recreates what ...

The inner workings of large AI systems remain largely opaque, raising significant safety and trust issues. Researchers have now developed a technique to extract and manipulate the internal concepts ...

The scent of fresh bread straight from the oven is intoxicating. As sugars and proteins react under heat, they create compounds that give golden-brown crusts their rich aroma. Called advanced ...

Summer barbecues have a special place in my heart. The smell of charcoal-grilled burgers. Ice-cold fizzy drinks. Music, laughs—and the incessant buzzing of mosquitoes. While mostly a nuisance at ...

When Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica in 2025, it was the strongest storm ever to hit the island. The hurricane’s rapid intensification left forecasters stunned. When it comes to ...

Such sensors could one day carry out MRI at the scale of individual cells or aid researchers in drug development. Fragile quantum states might seem incompatible with the messy world of biology. But ...

The main problem with big tech’s experiment with artificial intelligence is not that it could take over humanity. It’s that large language models (LLMs) like Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and ...

The bacteria grew, thrived, and divided for hundreds of generations. But they were unlike any other living creatures on Earth. These synthetic cells, called Ec19, were the first to have had one ...

Synthetic biologists have long dreamed of constructing artificial cells from the bottom up. Researchers have now taken a major step in this direction by demonstrating that non-living components can be ...