They are weird, bald, subterranean rodents that look like sausages with teeth, and they have just revealed a genetic secret to long life. A new study of the bizarre naked mole rat shows that the ...

Nobel laureate Har Gobind Khorana's groundbreaking work on the genetic code, deciphering how DNA sequences translate to proteins, laid the foundation for modern molecular biology. His research, ...

Xenobiology is a new and rapidly growing branch of science that studies how life could exist using biological systems different from those that prevail on the earth. The word comes from the Greek for ...

HUNTINGTON’S DISEASE is arguably the nastiest inherited illness around. Symptoms include involuntary jerking, difficulty swallowing and speaking, lapses of memory, lack of concentration, depression, ...

Can AI create a life form? These “generative” genomes are a start Artificial intelligence can draw cat pictures and write emails. Now the same technology can compose a working genome. A research team ...

Most organisms on Earth have the same basic genetic code, but it comes with some flaws. Scientists sought to work out those errors by creating their own artificial genome, which replaced E. coli’s ...

We’ve heard of GMOs, but this is ridiculous. Scientists at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology say they’ve engineered a bacteria whose genetic code is more efficient than ...

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 ...

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.

We have gone further than ever before in creating life that is unlike anything that has evolved naturally. The genome of an Escherichia coli bacterium has been redesigned on a computer to use just 57 ...