NEW YORK – Science may be humankind’s greatest success as a species. Thanks to the scientific revolution that began in the seventeenth centu…

LONDON – On April 25, 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson published a one-page paper that many believed would revolutionize biological rese…

CLEVELAND – For thousands of years, humans have used genetic engineering to control the evolution of plants and animals. So it is inevitable…

NEWARK, NJ – Plastics are everywhere. Whether used to store leftovers, keep hospital equipment sterile, or insulate a home, plastics are unm…

LONDON – What defines a modern human? The biological answer is simple: a member of the species Homo sapiens that is characterized by such fe…

LONDON – Fifty-one years ago, James Watson, Maurice Wilkins, and Francis Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery …

PALO ALTO – People everywhere are increasingly vulnerable to the use of what Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir dubbed “pathologica…

ATHENS, GEORGIA – In the waning weeks of the North American hurricane season – a time when a superstorm is not expected to cause widespread …

STANFORD – Last January, China’s environmental authorities barely averted the contamination of nearly three million people’s drinking water …

EXETER – Those who believe that a supernatural being created the universe have never posed an intellectual challenge to evolutionary theory.…

COLD SPRING HARBOR – Since the human genome was first sequenced in 2000, genome science has accelerated at a remarkable rate. Rapid advances…

MARSEILLE – Many Greek philosophers perceived the world to be in perpetual motion – a process of constant evolution. In Charles Darwin’s wor…

VIENNA– Europe’s current financial squeeze defies easy solutions. Self-inflicted austerity has met popular restlessness for more tangible me…

SEATTLE – Very soon, it will be economically feasible to sequence human genomes and collect massive amounts of different types of health dat…

PARIS – Biology and economics face similar challenges: both seek to explain survival and innovation in an unpredictable world. For example, …

BIRMINGHAM – The dramatic events that unfolded at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant after last year’s tsunami are commonly refer…

NEW YORK – Few people outside Italy are aware that six seismologists and a government official are on trial in the small city of L’Aquila. B…

CAMBRIDGE – Fifty years ago, particle physicists faced an unexpected challenge. Their best mathematical models could account for some of the…

PALO ALTO – Despite high expectations, productivity is frustratingly low in biopharmaceutical research and development. Although expenditure…

NAIROBI – For the elephants that are returning to southern Angola, after herds were devastated during the country’s civil wars, the battle i…

LONDON – It’s 1946. On one side of the Atlantic, American lawyers are prosecuting Nazi doctors at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity – so…

MADISON –Humans are undeniably complex, and proud of it. No case, we believe, needs to be made for our biological superiority. Our biologica…

OXFORD – It was recently discovered that the universe’s expansion is accelerating, not slowing, as was previously thought. Light from distan…

PRINCETON – Each February, I begin the introductory electricity and magnetism course at Princeton University by telling my students that the…

CHICAGO – The world’s first “quantum” computer – a machine that harnesses the magic of quantum phenomena to perform memory and processing ta…