Biology | featured news

In a Supreme Court test of whether a company can be granted a patent on the genes in the human body, a majority of the justices indicated during Monday's oral arguments that the court is likely to rule that a human gene can’t be patented. It would be one thing, several of the justices said during Monday’s oral arguments, for a company to seek a patent on a test for breast cancer that was developed by analyzing a human gene, but it would be going too far to be awarded a patent on the gene itself.

With the reams of digital data we’re creating, there’s an immense potential for DNA to be a stable, long-term archive for ordinary information, such as photographs, books, financial records, medical files, and videos—all of which today are stored as computer code on fallible, power-hungry storage devices that, unlike DNA, become obsolete.

Scientists have given another eloquent demonstration of how DNA could be used to archive digital data. The UK team encoded a scholarly paper, a photo, Shakespeare's sonnets and a portion of Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream speech in artificially produced segments of the "life molecule".

That wonder molecule of life on Earth, DNA, is now being enlisted in the search for an exotic species zooming through the cosmos: dark matter... As far back as the 1930s, astronomers watching distant galaxies saw that something was missing: There were not enough stars to account for the heavy gravity needed to whirl galaxies so quickly or smash them together so swiftly.

Word that a giant eyeball washed up on a South Florida has created a buzz on the Internet and in the marine biology community. The huge, blue eyeball may have come from a deep sea squid or a large sword fish, said Heather Bracken-Grissom, an assistant professor in the marine science program at Florida International University in Miami.

Harvard scientists have created a type of “cyborg” tissue for the first time by embedding a three-dimensional network of functional, biocompatible, nanoscale wires into engineered human tissues.

Using rat heart cells and silicone polymer, researchers have bioengineered a "jellyfish" that knows how to swim. The odd jellyfish mimic, dubbed a "Medusoid" by its creators, is more than a curiosity. It's a natural biological pump, just like the human heart. That makes it a good model to use to study cardiac physiology, said study researcher Kevin Kit Parker, a bioengineer at Harvard University.

The simulation, which runs on a cluster of 128 computers, models the complete life span of the cell at the molecular level, charting the interactions of 28 categories of molecules.

Stephen Quake, a prolific inventor whose application of physics to biology has led to breakthroughs in drug discovery, genome analysis and personalized medicine, has won the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, a prestigious award for outstanding innovators.

A living plant has been generated from the fruit of a little arctic flower, making it the oldest plant by far that has ever been grown from ancient tissue.