There are two really cool things about this research cruise: time and scale. The researchers are going from satellite images taken from far above the Earth, all the way down to the lipids and proteins found within individual Ehux cells, bridging a huge range of scales. They’re also using today’s observations to tell them about [...]

Well, perhaps your great-to-the-hundred-millionth-grandmother was. Understanding the origins of life and the mechanics of the earliest beginnings of life is as important for the quest to unravel the Earth’s biological history as it is for the quest to seek out other life in the universe. We’re pretty confident that single-celled organisms – bacteria and archaea [...]

It’s a long way from gene to protein. The dogmatic scenario is: DNA gets transcribed into RNA, which gets translated into protein. But in real life, and in real living things, the workings aren’t quite that simple. One example: individual units of RNA sometimes need to be converted, in what’s called RNA editing, into related [...]

There is no question that HIV is an ugly virus in terms of human health. Each year, it infects some 2.7 million additional people and leads to some two million deaths from AIDS. But a new album manages to locate some sonic beauty deep in its genome. Sounds of HIV (Azica Records) by composer Alexandra [...]

NEW YORK—Despite a cloud of regulatory uncertainty hanging over the U.S. stem cell research field, many young scientists spoke excitedly about their research Wednesday afternoon at the New York Stem Cell Foundation’s annual Translational Stem Cell Research Conference here at The Rockefeller University. Some of the most recent big-news breakthroughs have come in the realm [...]

Without genetic change we’d be nowhere—well perhaps just unicellular blobs kicking around in ponds. Alterations in DNA, such as point mutations, duplications, rearrangements and insertions from microbial neighbors, have helped humans and our deep-time ancestors climb out of the swamps and, in our case at least, start swimming in backyard pools. But these basic tools [...]