Science

The ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, buried in the Oxfordshire countryside near Didcot, is one of the most powerful microscopes on Earth. Its particle accelerator fires protons at a tungsten target, producing neutron beams that can peer inside jet turbine blades, probe the magnetic structure of exotic materials, and reveal the atomic architecture of proteins. […]

For roughly a decade, molecular biologists have lived with a strange asymmetry. The tools to read the genome treat all four DNA letters equally. A sequencing machine does not care whether it is counting an adenine, a cytosine, a guanine, or a thymine. But the tools to rewrite the genome have been stubbornly constrained. You […]

There is a point at which a wildfire stops being a fire and becomes something else entirely. It is not defined by acreage or flame height. It is not measured by evacuations or property loss. It happens when a fire generates so much heat that it punches through the troposphere and creates its own thunderstorm […]

For most of human history, the gap between a scientific breakthrough and the ethical rules that govern it was measured in generations. The technology to build rudimentary computers from clusters of living human brain cells already exists. The framework for asking whether tissue donors agreed to that use does not. A Comment article published July […]

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) has missed every target it has set for more than a decade. The 2019 deadline came and went. So did 2023. So did 2025. Along the way the campaign has racked up one of the most staggering success stories in public health history and, simultaneously, found itself trapped in […]

For as long as structural biology has guided protein engineering, the logic has been elegantly simple: determine where every atom sits, identify the parts that touch the substrate, and redesign those parts to improve function. If you want a CRISPR enzyme to stop editing the wrong DNA sequences, you find the residues that contact those […]

Every cell in the body carries a built-in security system. When DNA gets damaged — from radiation, chemicals, or routine errors in replication — a molecular alarm called the ATM-CHK2 checkpoint springs into action. It halts cell division, summons repair machinery, and if the damage is too severe, triggers the cell’s self-destruct sequence. This quality […]

For most cancers, the path to understanding begins with a biopsy, a clinical trial, and a cohort of patients who happen to live near a major medical center. But for a cancer as rare as angiosarcoma, a malignant tumor of the blood vessel walls that strikes roughly one person per million each year, that path […]

For decades, the dominant narrative in cancer biology has been one of accumulation: cells acquire mutations over time, one after another, until a critical mass of genetic errors flips the switch to malignancy. The genome you inherit has long been seen as little more than a canvas, passive background upon which the real drama of […]

The conversation about renewable energy and climate change usually follows a familiar script. Burning fossil fuels warms the planet. A warming planet changes wind patterns and cloud cover. Those changes reduce the output of wind turbines and solar panels. So climate change undermines the very infrastructure built to fight it. The logic is intuitive, widely […]