Most people wouldn’t give Geobacter sulfurreducens a second look. The bacteria was first discovered in a ditch in rural Oklahoma. But the lowly microbe has a superpower. It grows protein nanotubes ...

A petri dish full of dead bacteria isn’t usually cause for celebration. But for Stanford’s Brian Hie it was a game-changer in his efforts to create synthetic life. The perpetrator was a type of virus ...

In a small trial, a gene therapy injected into the brain slowed the disease by 75 percent over three years. Huntington’s disease is extremely cruel. Symptoms start with random, uncontrollable twitches ...

The dream of a universal AI interpreter just got a bit closer. This week, tech giant Meta released a new AI that can almost instantaneously translate speech in 101 languages as soon as the words ...

Vast swathes of the human genome remain a mystery to science. A new AI from Google DeepMind is helping researchers understand how these stretches of DNA impact the activity of other genes. While the ...

Summer barbecues have a special place in my heart. The smell of charcoal-grilled burgers. Ice-cold fizzy drinks. Music, laughs—and the incessant buzzing of mosquitoes. While mostly a nuisance at ...

Getting AIs to work together could be a powerful force multiplier for the technology. Now, Microsoft researchers have invented a new language to help their models talk to each other faster and more ...

Our bodies are constantly breaking down. Over time, their built-in repair mechanisms also fail. Knee cartilage grinds away. Hip joints no longer support weight. Treatments for breast cancer and other ...

Thanks to increasingly efficient and affordable gene sequencing technologies, we can now chart our genetic blueprint in unprecedented detail. But what does each gene do? Of the roughly 20,000 genes ...

CRISPR is revolutionary. It’s also a total brute. The classic version of the gene editing wunderkind literally slices a gene to bits just to turn it off. It’s effective, yes. But it’s like putting an ...

At first glance, the seven mice skittering around their cages look like other mice. But they have an unusual lineage: They were born with DNA from two dads. The mice join an elite group of critters ...

What happens when you can't tell the difference between a human and an AI chatbot? We're about to find out. None of us was expecting the arrival of super communicators. Science fiction taught us that ...