For many fathers, the prospect of telling their sons about the meaning of life induces apprehension. But when Francis Crick shared the secret of life with his 12-year-old son Michael, it was a hugely ...

Researchers have synthesized new ingredients for the blueprint of life. Steven Benner, a pioneer in the field of synthetic biology, and his team created four new DNA letters, according a study out and ...

Half a century ago today, Francis Crick bragged in the Eagle pub in Cambridge that he and his American collaborator, James Watson, had found "the secret of life". This claim, made half in jest over a ...

Two scientists think we can safeguard the world's knowledge against an apocalypse if we store it in DNA. How far-fetched is the idea? Ed Yong meets them to find out. Neither Ewan Birney nor Nick ...

DNA contains foundational information needed to sustain life. Understanding how this information is stored and organized has been one of the greatest scientific challenges of the last century. With ...

In 1984, geneticists recovered 229 base pairs of genetic code from a quagga, a subspecies of zebra extinct since the late 1800s. The achievement proved DNA could survive in dead things and spurred a ...

A research team led by the A*STAR Genome Institute of Singapore (A*STAR GIS) have developed a method to accurately and efficiently read DNA containing non-standard bases—a task once thought too ...

The cold case murder of a mother in 1988 has been finally solved thanks to DNA evidence found on a chilling letter sent to a local newspaper decades ago with intimate details of the crime. Anna Kane ...