Daniel Rourke /stream

Bookmark

There are tens of thousands of genes in the human genome: minuscule twists of DNA and RNA that combine to express all of the traits and characteristics that make each of…

Bookmark

From skin color to immunity, human biology is linked to our archaic ancestry.

Bookmark

Genomes are so regularly represented as strings of letters—As, Gs, Cs, and Ts—that it’s easy to forget that they aren’t just abstract collections of data. They exist in three dimensions. They…

Bookmark

When people think about SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, they imagine messages sent via radio—Jodie Foster tuning antennas, hoping to pick up signals from the “billions and billions” of star…

Bookmark

La Jolla geneticist J. Craig Venter has hired one of the world’s top computer scientists to help him try to prolong and improve people’s lives by deciphering hundreds of thousands of…

Bookmark

In June 2000, a press conference was held in the White House to announce an extraordinary feat: the completion of a draft of the human genome.

Bookmark

In the invisible, parallel world of Earth, they kill half the bacteria in the ocean every day, and invade a microbe host 10 trillion times a second around the world. There…

Bookmark

We put the question to experts in various fields. Biology is no stranger to large, international collaborations with lofty goals, they pointed out — the race to sequence the human genome…

Bookmark

The question of what defines the human has, of course, been kicking around since Socrates, and probably a lot longer. If it has yet to be satisfactorily resolved, then this, Pääbo…

Bookmark

By comparing individual DNA letters in multiple modern human genomes with those in the Neanderthal genome, the date of that interbreeding has now been pinned down to 65,000–90,000 years ago. Montgomery…

Bookmark

Friday's report by the Academy of Medical Sciences on the increasingly fuzzy boundaries between the human and the animal is the latest in a long series of policy reflections on how…

Bookmark

Freeman Dyson is one of those force-of-nature intellects whose brilliance can be fully grasped by only a tiny subset of humanity, that handful of thinkers capable of following his equations. His…

Bookmark

There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because…

Bookmark

The question is pretty simple: in the not-too-distant future you and I will have had our entire genomes sequenced (except perhaps those of you in California) - so how much hard…

Bookmark

The genomes of most modern humans are 1–4% Neanderthal — a result of interbreeding with the close relatives that went extinct 30,000 years ago, according to work by an international group…

Bookmark

Archaic humans such as Neanderthals may be gone but they're not forgotten — at least not in the human genome. A genetic analysis of nearly 2,000 people from around the world…

Bookmark

There are tens of thousands of genes in the human genome: minuscule twists of DNA and RNA that combine to express all of the traits and characteristics that make each of…

Bookmark

From skin color to immunity, human biology is linked to our archaic ancestry.

Bookmark

The ancestors of modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and another extinct line of humans known as the Denisovans at least four times in the course of prehistory, according to an analysis…

Bookmark

Genomes are so regularly represented as strings of letters—As, Gs, Cs, and Ts—that it’s easy to forget that they aren’t just abstract collections of data. They exist in three dimensions. They…

Bookmark

La Jolla geneticist J. Craig Venter has hired one of the world’s top computer scientists to help him try to prolong and improve people’s lives by deciphering hundreds of thousands of…

Bookmark

Human genome pioneer J. Craig Venter announced plans Tuesday to sequence the gene maps of 40,000 volunteers in a bid to crack the secrets of healthy human aging.

Bookmark

In the invisible, parallel world of Earth, they kill half the bacteria in the ocean every day, and invade a microbe host 10 trillion times a second around the world. There…

Bookmark

We put the question to experts in various fields. Biology is no stranger to large, international collaborations with lofty goals, they pointed out — the race to sequence the human genome…

Bookmark

The question of what defines the human has, of course, been kicking around since Socrates, and probably a lot longer. If it has yet to be satisfactorily resolved, then this, Pääbo…

Bookmark

By comparing individual DNA letters in multiple modern human genomes with those in the Neanderthal genome, the date of that interbreeding has now been pinned down to 65,000–90,000 years ago. Montgomery…

Bookmark

Visitors enter the dark, gargantuan room and take up postures of reverence in front of a massive screen, which towers 40 feet above them. They take off their shoes at the…

Bookmark

Freeman Dyson is one of those force-of-nature intellects whose brilliance can be fully grasped by only a tiny subset of humanity, that handful of thinkers capable of following his equations. His…

Bookmark

The question is pretty simple: in the not-too-distant future you and I will have had our entire genomes sequenced (except perhaps those of you in California) - so how much hard…

Bookmark

Archaic humans such as Neanderthals may be gone but they're not forgotten — at least not in the human genome. A genetic analysis of nearly 2,000 people from around the world…