People
- Animals
Embracing the swarm
Entomologist Michael Raupp is enjoying Swarmageddon. The giant batch of cicadas began emerging from the ground in late April and will be heard in some northeastern states through June.
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A genetic exhibitionist
The Science Life.
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- Humans
Exploring NASA’s quirky places
Best known for its role in crafting and commanding spacecraft such as Curiosity, JPL is also home to decades’ worth of accumulated oddities.
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Through a glass, less darkly
After finishing his Ph.D. on glass formation, chemical physicist Patrick Charbonneau thought he’d never study the material again. But something kept nagging him: In some experiments, materials would unexpectedly morph into glass, solid as a rock but molecularly disordered like a liquid. The results didn’t match with glass-formation theory, but they were easy to dismiss […]
- Genetics
Contest brings out the biohackers
Mix one part enthusiasm, two parts engineering and three parts biology — and you’ve got a recipe for do-it-yourself genetic engineering. Every November, college kids from Michigan to Munich descend on MIT, eager to show off their biohacking skills. In the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, teams battle one another to build the coolest synthetically altered organisms. If you want to create a microbe that will sniff out and destroy contaminants in mining waste ponds, or a cell that will produce drugs right in your body, iGEM is for you.
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Alt science
View the videoAfter a day of computer programming and poring over genetic data, Pardis Sabeti relaxes her brain by writing rock songs. Pardis Sabeti sorts through reams of genetic information to find genes that have been shaped by natural selection to resist disease. Olivier Douliery Born in Tehran, Sabeti is a computational biologist at Harvard […]
