Science
Can this pill protect us against ‘wide range’ of flu viruses?
The flu season is at its height in the Northern Hemisphere, but—as many are discovering—seasonal flu vaccines don’t always provide ...
How plant pollen could speed development of higher yielding CRISPR-edited crops
The genome editor CRISPR has transformed many areas of biology, but using this tool to enhance certain varieties of crops ...
Potato breeding ‘revolution’ aims to safeguard spuds against proliferating pests and climate change
In Peru and around the world, enhancing the potato has become a high priority. It is the most important food ...
Was life on Earth sparked by ‘moon-sized’ impact 4.4 billion years ago?
A cataclysm may have jump-started life on Earth. A new scenario suggests that some 4.47 billion years ago—a mere 60 ...
Born that way? Dog breed traits are rooted in their genetics, study shows
American Kennel Club descriptions of dog breeds can read like online dating profiles: The border collie is a workaholic; the ...
M.S. Swaminathan, ‘father of India’s Green Revolution,’ says he’s not opposed to GMO crops
An iconic Indian agricultural scientist is distancing himself from a recent editorial he co-authored that is critical of genetically modified ...
‘Cutting-edge’ artificial cells could boost precision medicine efforts
No biologist would mistake the microscopic "cells" that chemical biologist Neal Devaraj and colleagues are whipping up at the University ...
Geneticist George Church on why gene-edited babies aren’t such a bad thing
[Editor's note: Harvard geneticist George Church has come to the defense of Chinese researcher He Jiankui, who shook up the science ...
Human evolutionary theory challenged in global study by diversity of birth canals
The shape of a mother’s birth canal is a tug-of-war between two opposing evolutionary forces: It needs to be wide ...
Recreating the chemical soup that may have sparked life on earth
In the molecular dance that gave birth to life on Earth, RNA appears to be a central player. But the ...
EU’s ‘stringent’ gene-edited crop regulations starting to ‘chill’ plant breeding research
Three months after the European Union’s top court gave gene-edited crops the same stringent legal status as genetically modified (GM) ...
Peering into our body’s complicated relationship with the sun
One of the impressive things about biochemistry and cell biology is how it can produce physical correlates to things that ...
Quest to find molecule that sparks multiple sclerosis yields promising discovery
Researchers have long suspected that a self-antigen—a normal molecule in the body that the immune system mistakenly treats as a ...
Sustainability failure: Anti-GMO France’s 10-year effort to slash pesticide use boosted spraying by 12%
In 2008, the French government announced a dramatic shift in agricultural policy, calling for pesticide use to be slashed in ...
Mexico’s new science minister fiercely skeptical of GMO crops and new breeding techniques
In early June, evolutionary developmental biologist Elena Álvarez-Buylla received an out-of-the-blue phone call from the campaign of Andrés Manuel López ...
How a broken gene may have given us the ability to become ‘marathoners’
A new study in mice pinpoints how a stretch of DNA likely turned our ancestors into marathoners, giving us the ...
‘Jumping’ genes responsible for strawberry sexes show how fast plants evolve
[S]eparate sexes may seem fundamental to nature, but they’re an oddity for most plants. Now, scientists have figured out how ...
Scientists could save American Chestnut Tree with genetic engineering—if regulators let them
Two deer-fenced plots here contain some of the world’s most highly regulated trees. Each summer researchers double-bag every flower the ...
Promising HIV treatment fails in human trials
When Science published a monkey study nearly 2 years ago that showed an anti-inflammatory antibody effectively cured monkeys intentionally infected ...
Gene drives could speed up inheritance of certain beneficial traits in mammals, study finds
Researchers have used CRISPR, the genome editing tool, to speed the inheritance of specific genes in mammals for the first ...
Blood test could tell doctors when to use immunotherapy against cancer
Some cancers generate the seeds of their own destruction. Certain random mutations that accumulate in rapidly dividing tumor cells can ...
‘Trying to recreate Neanderthal minds’ using minibrains
[R]esearch teams are engineering stem cells to include Neanderthal genes and growing them into "minibrains" that reflect the influence of ...
Three genes that changed the course of human brain evolution
Three nearly identical genes could help explain how 0.5 liters of gray matter in early human ancestors became the 1.4-liter ...
Video: Our bodies continue ‘ticking right along’ after we die
When you’re dead, you’re dead—right? No pulse, no brain activity, no signs of life. But at the cellular level, things ...
Viewpoint: Pesticide regulations should assess societal context, not just safety
Apart from the inherent scientific complexity, the glyphosate case illustrates a fundamental societal issue. The mere fact that the European ...
How genes affect your dog’s athleticism—and what we might learn about ourselves
Compare the sprinting Shetland sheepdog with the sluggish St. Bernard, and it’s clear a dog’s genes play a large role ...
Can scientists keep white nationalists from misusing population genetics research?
Stormfront and similar online forums, as well as the comment sections on “alt-right” news websites and Twitter accounts, regularly host ...
Single gene variant could explain why Peruvians among world’s shortest people
Hundreds of genes influence how tall a person is, but most make an imperceptible difference—perhaps a millimeter, for example. Now, ...
