Browsing: Lens_biology

Genetic engineering will bring us new Bolts and Shaqs.

Alex Honnold doesn’t experience fear like the rest of us.

Fifteen years ago, almost as soon as she arrived in the Cleveland suburbs, her hometown, a high-pitched ringing disturbed Katie Hellmuth Martin’s sense of peace. She was looking forward to settling into the gentle sounds of summer she’d grown up with: birdcalls during the day, the relaxing cadence of crickets at night. Instead, her respite […]

It takes a bird brain to play contact sports safely.

To many people in New York City, a beautiful summer day is all about the trees. To be more specific, the American elm trees in the Central Park Mall, which form a promenade through the heart of the park. “Everybody’s always impressed by the wonderful cathedral-like ceiling of the Mall, especially if they’re new to […]

A Vancouver rat study is showing us how pest control can backfire.

Digestive Tract Bling: A bezoar mounted in gold filigree, from late-17th century India—now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. When you get right down to it, a body like ours is basically a bony scaffold that a strange collection of organs, interconnected by a complex entanglement of piping, hangs on. In some of these pipes, […]

It sounds like science fiction: A citizenry genetically engineered to be democratic. It’s not implausible. Last month, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report touting the promise of a biological engineering technique called gene drive—particularly for dealing with public health problems such as the Zika virus, malaria, and dengue fever. Last year, Anthony James, […]

Do you know what information is? No worries if you don’t. Clarity on the concept is apparently hard to come by. In a May cover story, New Scientist wondered, “What is information?” The answer: “a mystery bound up with thermodynamics” that “seems to play a part in everything from how machines work to how living […]

Urban din is forcing animal mating calls to be either unsexy or unheard.