Author: Lori Jia
The New York Times, February 23, 2026
Look at just about any vertebrate and you’ll see two eyes looking back at you. Falcons circling overhead have two eyes, just like hammerhead sharks roving through the ocean.
Scientists have long puzzled over how the vertebrate eye first evolved. A pair of new studies suggest a strange beginning: Our invertebrate ancestors 560 million years ago were cyclopes, with a single eye at the top of their head, scientists now propose, that only later split in two.
The New York Times, February 18, 2026
A flurry of new studies is shedding light on one of the biggest steps in the history of life: the evolution two billion years ago of complex cells from simpler ones. In the oceans and on land, scientists are discovering rare, transitional microbes that bridge the gap.
The differences between complex cells, including those in the human body, and simple microbes such as E. coli are stark. Complex cells are packed with compartments; one, known as the nucleus, stores DNA; others, called mitochondria, contain enzymes that generate the cell’s fuel supply. Complex cells are also supported internally by a mesh of filaments, that they use to crawl by breaking down parts of it and building new extensions.
The New York Times, January 28, 2026
In 2024, two scientists from Google DeepMind shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for an artificial-intelligence program called AlphaFold2.
For decades, scientists had struggled to understand how strings of molecular building blocks fold into the complex, three-dimensional structures of proteins. Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and their colleagues at Google DeepMind trained a program to predict the shapes; when AlphaFold2 was introduced in 2020, it performed so well at this task that scientists around the world adopted it.
Continue reading “Researchers Are Using A.I. to Decode the Human Genome”
The New York Times, January 25, 2026 (with Michael Barbaro, Luke Vander Ploeg, Alex Barron, Tina Antolini, Franz Lidz, Wendy Dorr, Efim Shapiro, Daniel Powell)
Pop culture has not been kind to the Neanderthal. In books, movies and even TV commercials, the species is portrayed as rough and mindless, a brutish type that was rightly supplanted by our Homo sapiens ancestors.
But even 40,000 years after the last Neanderthals walked the earth, we continue to make discoveries that challenge that portrayal. New research suggests Neanderthals might have been less primitive — and a lot more like modern humans — than we might have thought.
The New York Times, January 2, 2026 (interviewed by Carl Zimmer)
Brenna Henn: In my lab, we’re interested in characterizing human diversity, especially from populations that live in Africa or are descendants from Africa. One thing we wanted to address is the huge focus on personalized genetic medicine. The idea is that you get your genome sequenced, and then for heart disease or tuberculosis — pick your favorite disease — we’ll be able to give you a score of how likely you’ll be to develop these things.