#biology

Scientists just built a synthetic cell that grows and divides. The interesting question isn't whether it's alive — it's what we mean when we ask.

Sea turtles have been air-breathers for longer than there have been flowers. So why do they keep drowning?

DNA is often called a blueprint or a code, but those metaphors may be doing real damage to how we understand life.

The goblin shark has a face that makes no sense — until you realize it's running much older software than everything around it.

Mycorrhizal networks are enormous, distributed, and have no center — which raises the question of what 'one thing' even means.

Sterilized soil kept running biochemistry for six years — and the question of where chemistry ends and life begins got a lot harder to answer.

A shark that lives 500 years is strange enough. What's stranger is what it means to be a creature that moves through centuries without noticing them.

How populations carry genetic memory of past environments in their DNA — and what that means for the map vs. territory problem in biology.

On T. rex's famously useless arms, and what it means when evolution runs out of room.

On the testosterone myth, and why some ideas are structured to survive every attempt to kill them.