When Chemistry Became Biology Jack W. Szostak, 2025 · Photo by Christopher P. Michel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons A Nobel laureate explores the moment chemistry first became biology Editor’s Note Dr. Jack W. Szostak is University Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. […]
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The Language Before Language Prof. Gustavo Caetano-Anollés in his laboratory · © University of Illinois Dr. Gustavo Caetano-Anollés on dipeptides, dual codes, and the emergence of biological meaning Editor’s Note I first encountered Gustavo Caetano-Anollés through a paper that immediately drew my attention. Not because of its conclusions, but because of the scale of the
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The Emergence of Seconds Dr. Giovanni Barontini · © University of Birmingham An experiment suggests that time may not be fundamental, but something that emerges from within Editor’s Note Giovanni Barontini is Professor of Physics at the University of Birmingham, where he is part of the Atomic Quantum Systems group. His research focuses on ultracold
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The Pattern Life Leaves Behind Self portrait · Photo courtesy of Dr. Fabian Klenner The search for life beyond Earth is looking in a new place: the statistical order hidden in molecules Editor’s Note Dr. Fabian Klenner is an assistant professor of planetary sciences at the University of California, Riverside, and co-author of a study
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Self portrait of Henriette van Praag, Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University’s Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute and Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine. Image credit: Henriette van Praag How a protein released by exercising muscle may hold the key to protecting the aging brain — without touching a single amyloid plaque Editor’s Note For nearly a
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Self portrait, Image credit: Dr. Junyue Cao The Synchronized Clock: Is Aging a Body-Wide Orchestration? A large-scale single-cell atlas suggests that aging is coordinated across tissues and begins earlier than previously assumed Editor’s Note Aging is often described as a gradual accumulation of damage within individual tissues. Recent work by Dr. Junyue Cao and colleagues
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Holly Rucker, doctoral candidate in the Kaçar Lab, Department of Bacteriology, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her study “Resurrected nitrogenases recapitulate canonical N-isotope biosignatures over two billion years” was published in Nature Communications on January 22, 2026. Photo: Kaçar Lab, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Holly Rucker on resurrecting a 3.2-billion-year-old enzyme, reading life from rocks, and what it
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Prof. Shengxi Huang, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and bioengineering at Rice University, leads the SCOPE Lab, where light becomes a language for reading the molecular life of cells.Image: Jeff Fitlow / Rice University Ziyang Wang, Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering at Rice University, works at the intersection of Raman spectroscopy
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Ramsey Wilcox. Image courtesy of the Decision Neuroscience Laboratory, University of Notre Dame How the brain’s global organization, not any single region, gives rise to the mind’s remarkable unity Editor’s Note For much of modern neuroscience, the search for intelligence resembled a cartographic exercise. Researchers mapped the brain as though its most complex abilities might
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AlphaGenome How Google DeepMind’s AI is unlocking the 98% of our genome science couldn’t read Editor’s Note For decades, the human genome has been described as the ultimate biological blueprint, yet large sections of it, the so-called “non-coding” regions, remained a silent language we could not translate. We understood the individual letters, but the complex