The genetic code is the recipe for life, and provides the instructions for how to make proteins, generally using just 20 amino acids. But certain groups of microbes have an expanded genetic code, in ...

There are few hard and fast rules in the study of life, but perhaps the closest we get is the central dogma of molecular biology: DNA is transcribed to RNA, which gets translated into proteins. The ...

DNA sequencing is one of today's most critical scientific fields, powering leaps in humanity's understanding of genetic causes of cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and diabetes. One issue facing the ...

Social media companies and their respective algorithms have repeatedly been accused of fueling political polarization by promoting divisive content on their platforms. Now, two U.S. Senators have ...

Dr. David Buchner is an accomplished geneticist and educator whose career spans more than two decades of research and leadership in human genetics, metabolic disease, and computational genomics. He ...

You’re at the checkout screen after an online shopping spree, ready to enter your credit card number. You type it in and instantly see a red error message ...

Do you remember the early days of social media? The promise of connection, of democratic empowerment, of barriers crumbling and gates opening? In those heady days, the co-founder of Twitter said that ...

Ever wondered how social media platforms decide how to fill our feeds? They use algorithms, of course, but how do these algorithms work? A series of corporate leaks over the past few years provides a ...

An illustration of E. coli. Scientists have been racing to shrink the genetic code of this bacterium. Kateryna Kon / Science Photo Library via Getty Images The DNA of nearly all life on Earth is made ...

If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle the easiest pieces first. But this kind of sorting has a cost.

The DNA of nearly all life on Earth contains many redundancies, and scientists have long wondered whether these redundancies served a purpose or if they were just leftovers from evolutionary processes ...

In a giant feat of genetic engineering, scientists have created bacteria that make proteins in a radically different way than all natural species do. By Carl Zimmer At the heart of all life is a code.