Michael Levin is an interesting thinker; a rare Platonist in Biology. This quote from a recent post of his makes me think of biological engineering, but not the kind where we force organisms to do our willing, but rather work with their agential capacity t...

Seeing before LUCA. Most genes trace back to the Last Universal Common Ancestor (~4.2 billion years ago) and stop — a barrier beyond which we cannot see. But universal paralogs are different: rare gene families present in all organisms today that were du...

Lab-grown brain circuits reveal who's really in charge. Nagoya University researchers fused thalamic and cortical organoids derived from human iPS cells, watching axons extend bidirectionally to form synapses. Neural activity propagates from thalamus to co...

DNA through nanopores: not knots, but twisted coils. For decades, scientists thought messy electrical signals during nanopore sequencing were caused by DNA knots. Zheng & Keyser (Cavendish Laboratory, Physical Review X 2025) discovered they're actually ple...

Spider silk's molecular transformation from liquid to fiber. Based on King's College London / SDSU research (Feb 2026) revealing how arginine-tyrosine 'stickers' drive silk formation. Cation-π interactions between these amino acids initiate liquid-liquid ...