Science

What on earth is a xenobot?

The more we understand how cells produce shape and form, the more inadequate the idea of a genomic blueprint looks

Philip Ball

The web of life

Classic evolutionary theory holds that species separate over time. But it’s fuzzier than that – now we know they also merge

Juli Berwald

An idea with bite

The ‘selfish gene’ persists for the reason all good scientific metaphors do: it remains a sharp tool for clear thinking

J Arvid Ågren

Brains in a dish

What pea-sized brain organoids reveal about consciousness, the self and our future as a species

Alysson Muotri

The science of terrible men

The pioneers of social genetics were racists and eugenicists: should we give up on the science they founded altogether?

Kathryn Paige Harden

If trauma can be passed down, could new therapies blunt the transgenerational impact?

9 minutes

The genes we’re dealt

The new field of social genomics can be used by progressives to combat racial inequality or by conservatives to excuse it

Erik Parens

Choose your own birth

Every human is both an animal with a deep evolutionary history and an individual who must bring their existence into being

Ada Jaarsma

In the tug-of-war between mother and baby, the placenta is a life-giving referee

4 minutes

Consider the axolotl: our great hope of regeneration?

Scott Sayare

Like the emperor’s new clothes, DNA kits are a tailored illusion

George Estreich

The right to know, or not know, the data from medical research

Emily Willingham

Hormones united

The hormone system works like a democracy: every tissue in the body is an endocrine organ asserting its needs and demands

Liam Drew

Wired that way: genes do shape behaviours but it’s complicated

Kevin Mitchell

Spidergoats to the rescue! How to make silk from milk with genetic engineering

6 minutes

Enlightenment rationality is not enough: we need a new Romanticism

Jim Kozubek

Haunted by history

War, famine and persecution inflict profound changes on bodies and brains. Could these changes persist over generations?

Pam Weintraub

In to Asia

New evidence about the ancient humans who occupied Asia is cascading in: the story of our species needs rewriting again

Christopher Bae

We are multitudes

Women are chimeras, with genetic material from both their parents and children. Where does that leave individual identity?

Katherine Rowland

Even if genes affect intelligence, we can’t engineer cleverness

Jim Kozubek