Atlantic

[T]he startle reflex might be an evolutionary point of origin for many of our most common human emotional expressions. When ...

“How do you know we’re the only time there’s been a civilization on our own planet?” [said Goddard Institute for ...

We can hack our technologies, and even our societies, so why not ourselves? Alas, things are not so straightforward. While ...

When scientists in France set out to sequence 1,000 yeast genomes, they looked at strains from all the places you ...

It’s a rare person who goes out of their way to spend time with psychopaths, and a rarer one still ...

I came to First in Fly, a new book about fruit-fly research, with perhaps some special interest. In fact, a popular ...

Yaniv Erlich has been a white-hat hacker and a geneticist at Columbia University, and now he works for a genealogy company. This unusual ...

In 2016, Josiah Zayner, a former synthetic biology research scientist at NASA, checked himself into a hotel room. Over the ...

Out on an old Navy dry dock, a biotech company called Ginkgo Bioworks is growing genetically modified organisms by the ...

[F]or the third week in a row, flu activity remains widespread in 49 states, according to the latest CDC data ...

To better understand [incurable inherited disease neurofibromatosis type 1, Charles] Konsitzke learned, you need a species that’s closer in both ...

As a whole, Manhattan’s rats are genetically most similar to those from Western Europe, especially Great Britain and France. They ...

In the fall of 2013, Charlotte Lindqvist got a call from a film company making an Animal Planet documentary about ...

[Researcher Jon Nadeau’s] hypothesis—that the egg could woo sperm with specific genes and vice versa—is part of a growing realization ...

Passenger pigeons were once the most abundant bird in North America, and quite possibly the world. … In a matter ...

[L]ast year, Kevin Sinclair, a developmental biologist at the University of Nottingham, published a paper about several clones including Dolly’s four “sisters,” who ...

[Researcher Osamu] Nureki’s paper was published in Nature Communications Friday, and by early morning, the video that astonished the room in [a CRISPR ...

U.K. Biobank [recruited] 500,000 volunteers for a massive study on the origins of disease. In addition to collecting blood and urine, ...

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, around 62 miles west of what would eventually become Marrakesh, a group of people ...

I visited Greenland because, lately, the land here has gone soft, and disquieting things threaten to wake in it. … ...

[S]ocial sciences [tend] to focus on people from WEIRD societies—that is, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. The results of such studies ...

[E]ye doctors based primarily at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami had published a widely covered report describing three eerily similar cases: ...

There are genes known as retrotransposons that can copy themselves and paste the duplicates in other parts of our DNA, ...

James Kugel has been spent his entire scholarly career studying the Bible, but some very basic questions about it still ...

“These tests at their best allow new forms of connection that might not have been otherwise possible,” says Alondra Nelson, ...

As few as five years ago, [biochemist Jennifer Doudna] was, by her own admission, working head-down in an ivory tower, with ...

Recent years...have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that...people are susceptible to false information and fake news. “My sense ...

DvSnf7 dsRNA is an unusual insecticide. You don’t spray it on crops. Instead, you encode instructions for manufacturing it in ...