The pancreas pumps more insulin in response to the sugar, potentially throwing the body’s energy-storage machinery out of whack.

A new way to evaluate molecules offers a finer-grained picture of which ones could become drugs.

Munched by a manipulated microbe, ocean algae readily yield ethanol.

Take a grainy, blurred image of a formless face or an illegible license plate, and with a few keystrokes the picture sharpens and the killer is caught — if you’re a crime-scene tech on TV. From Harrison Ford in Blade Runner to CSI, Criminal Minds and NCIS, the zoom-and-enhance maneuver has become such a staple of Hollywood dramas that it’s mocked with video montages on YouTube. In real life, of course, no amount of high-techery can disclose data not captured by a camera in the first place. But scientific advances are now gaining ground on fictional forensics. The field known as computat... (p. 22)

Octopuses adapt to water temperature with tweaks to how genes are copied, not DNA itself. (p. 11)

Creatures use their tails to balance during complex maneuvers.