Holly Rucker on resurrecting a 3.2-billion-year-old enzyme and what it means for an ancient mechanism to be that still

There is a version of this story that sounds like triumph. Scientists reconstruct a primordial enzyme and insert it into a living bacterium. They confirm that the molecular signature in the rock record is exactly what geologists assumed.

Shengxi Huang and Ziyang Wang on mapping the molecular landscape of Alzheimer’s disease without dyes or deciding in advance what to look for

For most of its history, Alzheimer’s research has proceeded through a necessary narrowing. Faced with a disease of staggering complexity, scientists identified specific targets, amyloid plaques and tau tangles, and built their methods around them.