Biology, Science | featured news

Scientists have given another eloquent demonstration of how DNA could be used to archive digital data. The UK team encoded a scholarly paper, a photo, Shakespeare's sonnets and a portion of Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream speech in artificially produced segments of the "life molecule".

Harvard scientists have created a type of “cyborg” tissue for the first time by embedding a three-dimensional network of functional, biocompatible, nanoscale wires into engineered human tissues.

Using rat heart cells and silicone polymer, researchers have bioengineered a "jellyfish" that knows how to swim. The odd jellyfish mimic, dubbed a "Medusoid" by its creators, is more than a curiosity. It's a natural biological pump, just like the human heart. That makes it a good model to use to study cardiac physiology, said study researcher Kevin Kit Parker, a bioengineer at Harvard University.

The simulation, which runs on a cluster of 128 computers, models the complete life span of the cell at the molecular level, charting the interactions of 28 categories of molecules.

A living plant has been generated from the fruit of a little arctic flower, making it the oldest plant by far that has ever been grown from ancient tissue.

Many of Earth's species appear to be shrinking in size, a new study reports, and its authors think that's probably due to global warming.

A small but growing number of field biologists study urban evolution — the biological changes that cities bring to the wildlife that inhabits them.

The human race has scaled the tallest mountains, charted the deepest oceans and played a quick front nine on the freaking moon, but there's one frontier that still largely mystifies us: our own bodies. There are everyday phenomenons you'd think must have been explained ages ago, but in reality asking these simple questions of a scientist will net you at best a shrug, and at worst some bullshit he just made up off the top of his head.

At TED 2009, Juan Enriquez talked about the new human species emerging before our eyes. Thanks to an array of biological advances and our growing aptitude in robotics, we now find ourselves in the early days of the deliberate creation of what he called a new species.