A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides an enlightening window into the history of global trade and human population movement through a perhaps surprising source: pepper genetics. . . .   Read More

Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, journalist James Nestor questions the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function, breathing. Nestor tracks down . . .   Read More

Our March Seminar speaker is Jane Metcalfe, the Founder and CEO of NEO.LIFE, a digital media company she created in 02017 to explore the rapidly developing fields of biology and technology and how they are shaping the future of our species. Metcalfe is also the co-founder of WIRED. NEO.LIFE has just . . .   Read More

Artist and professor, Dornith Doherty, has traveled to Svalbard, Norway and to Sussex, England, among others, to document the ethereal nature of the seeds stored in these sub zero temperature vaults. The Millennium Seed Bank in Sussex now contains more than 2.3 billion seeds, spanning more than 40,000 different species. As reported . . .   Read More

Six date-palm trees in Israel have sprouted two millennia after their seeds came into existence. As Sarah Zhang writes for The Atlantic, the collection of seeds recently planted all germinated in ancient archaeological sites and have been radiocarbon dated back to around A.D. 00047. The plants, named Adam, Jonah, Uriel, Boaz, Judith, . . .   Read More

A recent article in phys.org reports on a newly-published study on the use of genetically engineered moths to increase crop protection. The Cornell study documents the successful application and release of self-limiting, genetically engineered diamondback moths to fields of brassica crops.  “The diamondback moth, also known as Plutella xylostella, is highly . . .   Read More

On September 25th, the UN-led Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark report on the impact of climate change on the world’s oceans. Over 100 authors from 36 countries analyzed the latest scientific findings on the cryosphere in a changing climate. The picture the report paints is dire, . . .   Read More

Revive & Restore has released a 200-page report providing the first-of-its-kind assessment of genomic and biotech innovations to complement, enhance, and accelerate today’s marine conservation strategies.

Revive & Restore’s mission is to enhance biodiversity through the genetic rescue of endangered and extinct species. In pursuit of this and in. . .   Read More

In 01872, California Governor Leland Stanford hired the famed photographer Eadweard Muybridge to settle a question of popular debate—whether all four of a horse’s feet ever left the ground when it galloped. The resulting series of photographs, Sallie Gardner at a Gallop, showed without a doubt that horses do indeed go airborne at. . .   Read More

For over 100,000 years, wide swaths of the northern part of the globe were covered in grasslands where millions of bison, horses, and woolly mammoths grazed. Known as the Mammoth Steppe, it was the world’s most extensive biome, stretching from Spain to Canada, with more animal biomass than the African Savannah. With the. . .   Read More