Daniel Rourke /stream

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Could cancer be our cells’ way of running in “safe mode,” like a damaged computer operating system trying to preserve itself, when faced with an external threat? That’s the conclusion reached…

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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…

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n 1953, at the dawn of modern computing, Nils Aall Barricelli played God. Clutching a deck of playing cards in one hand and a stack of punched cards in the other,…

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Craig Venter reclines in his chair, puts his feet up on his desk and - gently stroking his milk chocolate-coloured miniature poodle, Darwin, asleep in his arms - shares his vision…

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Deborah Gordon spent the morning of August 27 watching a group of harvester ants foraging for seeds outside the dusty town of Rodeo, N.M. Long before the first rays of sun…

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Synthetic biology grew from a very old human desire to engineer living systems and make them do useful things for us.

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In the late 1980s, scientists at Osaka University in Japan noticed unusual repeated DNA sequences next to a gene they were studying in a common bacterium. They mentioned them in the…

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Animals like to hoard. Christopher E. Overtree, director of the Psychological Services Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a specialist in treating hoarding, says that “the mechanisms triggering this…

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Why science would benefit from a symbiosis-driven history of speciation. During a recent meal with a friend who happens to be a successful engineer, I found myself drawn, as usual, into…

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The first draft of the Neanderthal genome, published in 2010, came with some titillating news. It showed that some 50,000 years ago, these ancient hominids interbred with the ancestors of many…

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Editor's note: Stuart Pimm is the Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, and the 2006 laureate of the Dr. A. H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences awarded by…

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Hilary Rose is a prominent feminist and sociologist and is currently a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Steven Rose is a neurobiologist at the Open University and the…

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The ultimate design material is one that understands what it is to become. By way of an example, I’d like to think about how we might design a chicken. Think of…

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Digital information is accumulating at an astounding rate, straining our ability to store and archive it. DNA is among the most dense and stable information media known. The development of new…

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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…

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lecture by Craig Venter Life is code, as you heard in the introduction, was very clearly articulated by Schrodinger as code script. Perhaps even more importantly, and something I missed on…

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For medical researchers and biochemists, simulation software will vastly speed the early stages of screening for new compounds. And for molecular biologists, models that are of sufficient accuracy will yield new…

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Craig Venter spins increasingly ubiquitous metaphor: "The digital and biological worlds are becoming interchangeable" "All living cells that we know of on this planet are 'DNA software'-driven biological machines comprised of…

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Meanwhile, Richard Dawkins was picking another fight. Normally, this would not be an occasion worthy of comment. The best way to distinguish between Professor Dawkins’ waking and sleeping states is probably…

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Could cancer be our cells’ way of running in “safe mode,” like a damaged computer operating system trying to preserve itself, when faced with an external threat? That’s the conclusion reached…

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…

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In what appears to be the first study of its kind, computer scientists report that an algorithm discovered more than 50 years ago in game theory and now widely used in…

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Craig Venter reclines in his chair, puts his feet up on his desk and - gently stroking his milk chocolate-coloured miniature poodle, Darwin, asleep in his arms - shares his vision…

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Synthetic biology grew from a very old human desire to engineer living systems and make them do useful things for us.

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Evolution’s retirement plan has been 3.6 billion years in the making. With the appearance of the modern human being, we now have an organism that can take over from natural processes…

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Animals like to hoard. Christopher E. Overtree, director of the Psychological Services Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a specialist in treating hoarding, says that “the mechanisms triggering this…

Bookmark

Why science would benefit from a symbiosis-driven history of speciation. During a recent meal with a friend who happens to be a successful engineer, I found myself drawn, as usual, into…

Bookmark

The first draft of the Neanderthal genome, published in 2010, came with some titillating news. It showed that some 50,000 years ago, these ancient hominids interbred with the ancestors of many…

Bookmark

Editor's note: Stuart Pimm is the Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, and the 2006 laureate of the Dr. A. H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences awarded by…

Bookmark

team of archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and paleoartists has created a more accurate Neanderthal reconstruction, based on a nearly complete skeleton discovered in France more than 100 years ago. The La Ferrassie Neanderthal…

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The ultimate design material is one that understands what it is to become. By way of an example, I’d like to think about how we might design a chicken. Think of…

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Digital information is accumulating at an astounding rate, straining our ability to store and archive it. DNA is among the most dense and stable information media known. The development of new…

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…

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For the most part, the biological metaphor has long been just that — a simplifying analogy rather than a blueprint for how to do computing. Engineering, not biology, guided the pursuit…

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For medical researchers and biochemists, simulation software will vastly speed the early stages of screening for new compounds. And for molecular biologists, models that are of sufficient accuracy will yield new…

Bookmark

Meanwhile, Richard Dawkins was picking another fight. Normally, this would not be an occasion worthy of comment. The best way to distinguish between Professor Dawkins’ waking and sleeping states is probably…

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Dyson refutes the idea that scientific revolutions are concept-driven, a stance pioneered by Thomas Kuhn in his controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and later endorsed by other theory-driven…