Haunted by the cystic fibrosis patients he could not help, one Iowa doctor commits his life to understanding what is broken deep inside their cells.

Researchers work in a mobile Fire-Eye laboratory in Beijing in June 2020. The labs can identify coronavirus infections, as well as decipher and analyze human DNA. (Fu ...

Scientists have discovered that DNA behaves in a surprising way when squeezed through tiny nanopores, overturning a long-held assumption in genetics research. What researchers once thought were knots ...

Editor’s note: This story includes graphic descriptions of sexual assault. Reader discretion is advised. A group of Summerlin private school students sexually assaulted a peer with ChapStick, a flute, ...

Megan Griffith-Greene is on the faculty at Poynter. Her work focuses on training and coaching funders interested in supporting local news, and is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight ...

DNA is the blueprint for life, influencing everything about us—including our health. We know that our genes, the genetic “words” that encode proteins, play a major role in health and disease. But the ...

In 1927, Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr debated the nature of what’s known as complementarity—the idea that a photon’s dual wave-like and particle natures can’t be measured at the same time. Now, two ...

A giant impact on the early Earth could have brought the building blocks of RNA to our planet, which new research suggests could have quickly formed in the presence of compounds called borates. When ...

Does the universe notice that we're paying attention to a quantum experiment? The answer goes against everything we thought we knew. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an ...

A thought experiment that was at the heart of an argument between famed physicists Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr in 1927 has finally been made real. Its findings elucidate one of the core mysteries ...

Scientists have created a live-cell DNA sensor that reveals how damage appears and disappears inside living cells, capturing the entire repair sequence as it unfolds. Instead of freezing cells at ...

We’re celebrating 180 years of Scientific American. Explore our legacy of discovery and look ahead to the future. In 1957, just four years after Francis Crick and other scientists solved the riddle of ...