Wired
GMO lamb with jellyfish glow gene sold at French market poses no risk to humans or environment
A lamb born to a genetically altered sheep was deliberately sold for meat at a Parisian meat market, according to ...
Does your brain’s memory have a max storage capacity?
Each day you accumulate fresh memories—kissing new people, acquiring different phone numbers and (possibly) competing in pi-memorizing championships (we would ...
Modern genetics could bring back mouth-watering strawberries
Think about the best strawberry you ever tasted. Sweet, with a flavor that’s a greater-than-the-sum mix of overripe peach, underripe ...
Taco Bell, Pizza Hut go natural, but no one knows what that really means
Last week, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut both announced they are going natural. Goodbye Yellow-5. Ciao trans fat. Sayonara unsustainable palm oil. “Today’s ...
Are designer babies really in the near future?
Ever since in vitro fertilization made it possible for parents to select embryos with the best genetics, precisely-engineered progeny have been ...
Microbe ‘atlas’ shows what’s in the air you’re breathing
Advertisement. Every time you inhale, you suck in thousands of microbes. (Yes, even right then. And just then, too.) Butwhich microbes? ...
What do breast milk and narwhal milk have in common? Possible basis for vegan cheese?
Counter Culture Labs takes its name pretty literally. It is a bio lab, for sure, complete with pipettes, carboys, microscopes, and ...
First portable DNA sequencer proves fruitful in finding disease quickly and accurately
In June 2014, Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham reported an outbreak of Salmonella infection. It affected 30 patients and staff in two ...
Vanillin: Forerunner of synthetic biology flavors
Both the natural and chemical methods to make vanilla are costly and environmentally burdensome, but a new approach using the ...
How biotech is revolutionizing personalized medicine
Over the last several decades, DNA – the genetic material of life as we know it – has completed a remarkable ...
Iceland’s population proves invaluable to genetic research
The journal Nature Genetics released a set of four papers based entirely on the genetic sequences of Icelanders. Their results, which ...
Doomed mammoth-cloning attempt foiled by cosmic rays
Hwang Woo-Suk is the bad boy of genetics. He’s most famous for falsely claiming to have cloned human stem cells ...
Lucky fourth leaf: Mutation in clover DNA still a mystery
So you lost your job and your life’s a mess. You’re fat, you’re broke, you’re bad at sex. You’re looking at ...
Nex-gen technologies expand sequencing options for doctors
Genetic data has gone the way of fast food: It's cheap, speedy, and widely available. And that's a good thing, ...
Do people trust ‘hard’ neuroscience more than ‘soft’ psychology?
Imagine a politician from your party is in trouble for alleged misdemeanors. He’s been assessed by an expert who says ...
Union of Concerned Scientists join criticism of anti-GMO activist ‘attack’ on university researchers
The legal attack hit Kevin Folta in early February. After receiving a FOIA request from U.S. Right to Know—a nonprofit ...
Will next generation of herbicide-resistant crops cause more problems?
The latest in a new generation of genetically engineered crops is poised to enter widespread use—and critics think they'll cause ...
What Charles Darwin got wrong
It’s hard to overstate just how brilliant and huge an idea Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was ...
Antibiotic resistance may be bigger problem than previously thought
A project commissioned by the British government has released estimates of the near-future global toll of antibiotic resistance that are ...
Google’s Cloud searching for genetic causes of autism
Google has spent the past decade-and-a-half perfecting the science of recognizing patterns in the chaos of information on the web ...
Robot working hard to recreate origin of life
A cheap 3D-printed robot and a PlayStation camera are hard at work trying to find the origins of life. But ...
DNA test that tells identical twins apart to be used in forensic testing
In 2004, two young women were abducted at gunpoint while walking home near Boston at night. The crimes happened eight ...
Teens’ brains: Social processing fails when they hear mom’s criticism
We all know that teen-parent relations can be a tricky business. Now neuroscientists from several leading US universities think they’ve ...
How much does the public actually care about brain science?
It feels to me like interest in the brain has exploded. I’ve seen huge investments in brain science by the ...
What goes into the flu vaccine?
All flu vaccines start with flu viruses: genetic material packaged in an envelope of proteins and fats, studded with yet ...
Theater production broaches psychiatric health in modern life
City dwellers live life at a maddening pace. And while the urban jungle lets us experience incredible highs, its chaos ...
Re-enacting history of evolution in the laboratory
In his fourth-floor lab at Harvard University, Michael Desai has created hundreds of identical worlds in order to watch evolution ...
A new kind of sex? Strange micro-organism makes imperfect clones of itself
Oxytricha trifallax lives in ponds all over the world. Under an electron microscope it looks like a football adorned with tassels ...