On May 27, 1961, Heinrich Matthaei, a postdoc working with NIH scientist Marshal Nirenberg, placed synthetic polyuracil RNA into 20 test tubes to see what it would produce. Each tube contained ...

On a foggy Saturday morning in 1953, a tall, skinny 24-year-old man fiddled with shapes he had cut out of cardboard. They ...

The DNA of nearly all life on Earth contains many redundancies, and scientists have long wondered whether these redundancies served a purpose or if they were just leftovers from evolutionary processes ...

Carolyn Abraham is a science journalist and the author of The Juggler’s Children: A Journey into Family, Legend and the Genes that Bind Us, a bestselling memoir that explored the power of DNA tests to ...

The genetics of a marine protozoan may overturn one of the long-held tenets of protein synthesis. According to conventional wisdom, the genetic code is unambiguous: each DNA triplet, or codon, ...

Canadian researchers have helped uncover 15 new bird species through a process of genetic testing they say will pave the way for cataloguing the world's organisms. The discovery of so many new species ...