The Origin of Life

The Sixth Extinction, Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love, Ha! The Science of When we Laugh and Why, and Ten Thousand Birds

From San Francisco to St. Louis, biotech incubators are proliferating across North America. Can they deliver on their promise of fueling the economy?
 

A newcomer’s guide to the hottest gene-editing tool on the block

A guide to recent advances in ultra-low-temperature freezers and accessories that can help safeguard frozen samples
 

For the first time, researchers quantify the mechanical forces cells exert on one another.

Biochemistry reveals the missing link in a pathway that archaea and some bacteria use to generate essential compounds.

Unlike the usual smooth, spherical shape of exosomes, glioblastoma-derived exosomes appear to have long nanofilaments protruding from their surfaces.

Fossilized structures suggest that mat-forming microbes have been around for almost 3.5 billion years.

Geobiologist Roger Summons analyzes organic material in rocks found deep inside Earth, looking for evidence of how life originated and evolved on our planet—and possibly on Mars.
 

Lecturer, Department of Chemistry, University College London. Age: 32

Reconsidering the uniqueness of life on our planet

Ribosomal RNA fingerprints reveal the three domains of life.

Career options and research opportunities at two-year colleges are often underappreciated.

What can bioinformatics and systems biology tell us about the ancestor of all living things?

Researchers are using snowdrifts to artificially warm Arctic tundra during winter and finding that more carbon is released from the soil than plants can soak up from the atmosphere.

Scientists use DNA sequencing to identify what’s attracting birds to airports, where midair collisions with planes can be devastating.

Biologist Jelle Atema is putting the sensory capabilities of sharks to the test—and finding that the truth is more fascinating than fiction.

Degraded DNA from museum specimens, scat, and other sources has thwarted barcoding efforts, but researchers are filling in the gaps with mini-versions of characteristic genomic stretches.

March 2014's selection of notable quotes

How did Earth become biological?

Meet some of the people featured in the March 2014 issue of The Scientist.

Most scientists believe that ribonucleic acid played a key role in the origin of life on Earth, but the versatile molecule isn’t the whole story.