Tag: Biology and Biochemistry

A.I. Is Learning What It Means to Be Alive

In 1889, a French doctor named Francois-Gilbert Viault climbed down from a mountain in the Andes, drew blood from his arm and inspected it under a microscope. Dr. Viault’s red blood cells, which ferry oxygen, had surged 42 percent. He had discovered a mysterious power of the human body: When it needs more of these […]

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Poison Gas Hints at Potential for Life on Enceladus, a Moon of Saturn

Scientists have detected a poison among the spray of molecules emanating from a small moon of Saturn. That adds to existing intrigue about the possibility of life there. The poison is hydrogen cyanide, a colorless, odorless gas that is deadly to many Earth creatures. But it could have played a key role in chemical reactions […]

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Exactly How Much Life is on Earth?

What’s in a number? According to a recent calculation by a team of biologists and geologists, there are a more living cells on Earth — a million trillion trillion, or 10^30 in math notation, a 1 followed by 30 zeros — than there are stars in the universe or grains of sand on our planet. […]

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Omicron, Now 2 Years Old, Is Not Done With Us Yet

By November 2021, nearly two years after the coronavirus emerged in Wuhan and spread across the world, the surprises seemed to be over. More than four billion people had been vaccinated against the virus, and five million had died. Two new variants, known as Alpha and Delta, had surged and then ebbed. As Thanksgiving approached, […]

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Chimpanzees Go Through Menopause, Too

For biologists, menopause is baffling. If natural selection favors genes that produce more descendants, why don’t women remain fertile their entire lives? What’s the evolutionary benefit of living for so many years without having more babies? The mystery has only deepened as scientists have looked for menopause in mammals in the wild and found clear […]

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CRISPR, 10 Years On: Learning to Rewrite the Code of Life

Ten years ago this week, Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues published the results of a test-tube experiment on bacterial genes. When the study came out in the journal Science on June 28, 2012, it did not make headline news. In fact, over the next few weeks, it did not make any news at all. Looking […]

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