Kate Adamala paced the stage at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, a glowing red blob looming on the auditorium screen above her. She wore a black suit with a sticker on a lapel. On it was a cartoon blob smiling as it planted a flag on the moon.

“One Small Spud for Cellkind,” the sticker read — a riff on SpudCell, the name that Dr. Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota, had given to the red orb floating above her.

Continue reading “They Created a Cell That’s Almost Alive. What to Do With It Now?” →

The human microbiome — the trillions of microbes that live in our guts — was a stable ecosystem for tens of thousands of years before rapidly changing in industrialized countries, raising possible health concerns for modern people, scientists reported on Wednesday.

In a study of Africans and South Americans, researchers identified more than 600 species of bacteria that may once have been common in the gut but are now rare or missing entirely from people in most societies today.

Continue reading “Was the Human Gut Healthier in Ancient Times?” →

Imagine that a scientist sits you in a device that can detect changes in the activity of your brain, and then plays a cycle of sounds. Over and over you hear three low tones, followed by a high one. Then you hear something different: four low tones in a row.

The scientist doesn’t have to ask you if you were aware of the change. That’s because our brains typically respond to an oddball sound with a brief, distinctive blip.

Continue reading “Are Babies Conscious?” →

Scientists have discovered a virus that is a tiny bit human, carrying a gene it stole from our ancestors about 100,000 years ago. And this virus may be using our own gene to infect us.

Previous studies have demonstrated that viruses can pick up genes from their hosts. But the new discovery, reported Thursday in the journal Science, may be the first known instance of a virus with a human gene acquired in recent evolutionary history.

Continue reading “This Virus Stole a Human Gene and Won’t Let Go of It” →

When Anthropic, the artificial intelligence giant, unveiled findings from its new biology lab last week, its scientists claimed to have used A.I. agents to discover new enzymes with promise for biotechnology.

Some scientists were quick to cast doubt on the achievement. Then Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a computational biologist at the University of Copenhagen, said this weekend that he and his colleagues had been studying the enzymes and their associated molecules — which Anthropic calls ARTs — for four years.

Continue reading “Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own?” →