Ars Technica
Promising new diabetes treatment overcomes negative side effects
In Type 1 diabetes, the body's immune system destroys the cells that produce insulin, leaving your body unable to make ...
What is direct to consumer genetic testing actually worth?
Cyrus Farivar uses several direct to consumer genetic testing companies to explore his health risks, specifically for Alzheimer's disease. In ...
Push to predict how next year’s flu will evolve
Influenza viruses evolve rapidly, making it hard to develop protective vaccines against them. Despite a great deal of effort, scientists ...
Science inches toward science-fiction-style genetic augmentation
In 1953, molecular biologists James Watson and Francis Crick released what would be one of the most groundbreaking scientific discoveries ...
Memories of positive associations get written onto DNA
Another study adds to the growing list of experiements in which epigenetics appears involved in the process of locking memories ...
Giant genome study finds tiny links between genetics and schooling
The following is an excerpt. Everyone wants an easy answer to the big questions about genetics—is there a gay gene? ...
Biological logic gate built by splitting viral gene
The following is an edited excerpt. In recent years, researchers in the messy world of biology have been able to ...
We broke the tomato, and we’re using science to fix it
The following is an edited excerpt. Thanks to decades of breeding, the modern agricultural tomato has a lot of properties ...
Why would a biotech company keep a secret herd of goats?
The typical image of a modern biological research lab involves high-tech machinery and table-sized microscopes; at most, there might be ...
Complex behaviors driven by remarkably simple genetics
Humans engage in a lot of complex behaviors, but many of them are learned. Genetics gives us a nervous system ...
Bacterial “immune system” used to engineer human DNA in human cells
Precisely engineering the genome of human cells remains largely in the realm of science fiction. It's possible, with the right virus, ...
Bats evolved to fix DNA from damage caused by flight
[N]ow, thanks to our ability to sequence genomes, some researchers have provided a new picture of how bats manage to ...
The (epi)genetics of homosexuality
Although scientists have spent the last few decades scouring our genome for a “gay gene,” a new paper suggests it ...
What we know—and don’t know—about the biology of homosexuality
The media was abuzz this week after an international group of researchers proposed that scientists may have been looking for ...
Activists in UK plan to trash crop experiment
For researchers at the UK's Rothamsted research center, the past few weeks must have felt like a train wreck in ...
We’re all mutants now
The field of study called population genetics has played a critical role in the development of modern biology, helping unite ...
