Category: Story

In late 2012, French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier approached a handful of American scientists about starting a company, a Crispr company. They included UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna, George Church at Harvard University, and his former postdoc Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute—the brightest stars in the then-tiny field of Crispr research. Back then barely 100 papers…

The world seemed different this year, yes? Like something strange has been walking and rolling among us? Like we’re now sharing the planet with a new species of our own creation? Well, we are, because 2017 was the year that the robots really, truly arrived. They escaped the factory floor and started conquering big cities…

She’s probably mostly kidding when she tells the origin story this way, but Kathy Hudson—until last year the deputy director for science, outreach, and policy at the National Institutes of Health—says that a massive update to the NIH’s rules for funding science started with humiliation. A pal who ran approvals at the Food and Drug…

Glance at the night sky from a clear vantage point, and the thick band of the Milky Way will slash across the sky. But the stars and dust that paint our galaxy’s disk are an unwelcome sight to astronomers who study all the galaxies that lie beyond our own. It’s like a thick stripe of…

In remote areas of Brazil’s Amazon basin, yellow fever used to be a rare, if regular visitor. Every six to ten years, during the hot season, mosquitoes would pick it up from infected monkeys and spread it to a few loggers, hunters, and farmers at the forests’ edges in the northwestern part of the country.…

Update: At 3:45 PM Eastern on Tuesday, February 6, SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center. After nearly seven years of varying concepts, redesigns, and delays, SpaceX is poised to launch the Falcon Heavy rocket next week on its maiden flight. Last week, SpaceX performed a hold-down firing of the massive…

If humans ever leave this solar system, they probably won't do it aimlessly. More likely they'll set a course for some distant waypoint, perhaps another solar system, to visit, study, or maybe even settle. And when they do, there's a good chance the destination they choose will have been discovered by NASA's new planet-hunting spacecraft.…

Millennials, we’re assured by endless headlines, are the people most addicted to their devices. Addled by social networking, obsessed with taking selfies and hustling for likes, youngsters can’t put their damn phones down. Amirite? Nope. That is wrong. The data suggests that the ones most hooked on their devices are those graying Gen Xers. Research by…

Neill Stollman has been called the Tupac of poop transplants. The Oakland-based, board-certified gastroenterologist didn’t invent the treatment. But he did bring it to the west coast. His first patient was a woman in her 80s with a horrible case of Clostridium difficile, a gut infection that can strike patients after a course of antibiotics…

The dreaded chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis horrifies even the most sober-minded scientists. It grows on a frog’s ultra-sensitive skin, disrupting the organ's ability to absorb water and air. Considering the number of species the fungus impacts and its ability to rapidly drive them to extinction—as it’s done to hundreds of species so far—it’s considered “the…