Browsing: Lens_biology

The science of bacteria in the atmosphere is getting its moment in the sun.

In the early 1990s, a few miles west of El Kef, a town in Tunisia, geologists set a small golden spike in between two layers of clay that remains there to this day. They wanted to mark the tiny yet striking layer of iridium—a hard, dense, silvery-white metal—sandwiched in the middle. It was deposited by […]

Our physiological processes become increasingly simple as we age.

Despite the hyperbole, private funding is changing the science of aging for the better.

Is there a biochemical reason that extreme weather makes us happy?

By 1967, Vladimir Nabokov had published 15 novels and novellas and six short story collections. But as he told the Paris Review that year, “It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology”—the study and classification of butterflies—“and never written any novels at all.” […]

For the past few years, social scientists have been buzzing over a particular topic in molecular biology—gene regulation. The hype has been building steam for some time, but recently, it rocketed to the forefront of public discussion due to a widely circulated piece in the New Yorker. Articles on the topic are almost always fascinating: […]

The productive, bizarre career of Nobel laureate and early aging researcher Elie Metchnikoff.

A trip to a Louisiana river delta reveals an ecosystem that is growing up.

The growing role of grandparents in raising children is right in line with human biology.