Pursuing Synthetic Life, Dazzled by Reality
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The most profound insights to emerge from the pursuit of synthetic life just may be about real life.
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Superdense arrays of silicon electrodes will bring scientists closer to an artificial retina that approximates normal vision.
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Ray Kurzweil, an inventor fascinated with the connection between humans and computers, says that emerging trends in biotechnology are opening a realistic path to immortality.
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Fans of open-source programming and multiplayer gaming explore ways to bring the concept of the metaverse -- an infinitely expandable virtual world -- closer to fruition. By Daniel Terdiman.
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Genetic breakthroughs and an unlikely drug offer hope for a disease ravaging the eyes of an aging population.
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You can learn a lot from a microbe. Right now, a tiny critter from the Dead Sea is teaching scientists new things about biotechnology, cancer, possible life on other worlds. And that's just for starters.
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Scientists trying to create life are more like engineers than biologists. They want to make stuff rather than learn about life.
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Scientists have taken a first step toward making synthetic life by transferring genetic material from one bacterium into another, transforming the second microbe into a copy of the first.
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Human genome scientist Craig Venter says he has taken a major step towards creating life from scratch in the lab.
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New methane readings from a space probe raise the possibility that microbial life could exist on Mars. Some scientists, though, remain skeptical.
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Remote-control sharks, pain guns, radioactive scorpion venom ... Bond-like technology is unnervingly real in some labs. By Greta Lorge from Wired magazine.
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An international team of scientists has found life on a Norwegian island.  No surprises there, but the successful field test of a collection of life-detection instruments may be a stepping stone for future endeavors to sniff out life on Mars.
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New drugs that are to be tested in connection with a phenomenon called RNA interference have excited scientists with their versatile and powerful ability to affect genes.
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Scientists have grown a "brain" in a petri dish that can fly a simulated F-22 fighter airplane. It's all part of a quest to build "living" computers.
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You were expecting poetry, perhaps? The secret messages hidden in J. Craig Venterâs synthetic bacterial genome have now been revealed. They are Dr. Venterâs name, and that of his research institute and co-workers.
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NEW YORK A spectator with an especially intimate view of human evolution is beginning to tell its story and has so far divulged two quite unexpected findings.
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Researchers are goading tiny organisms like bacteria and algae into producing fuels like hydrogen and methane. The process is not useful yet, but the technology could be a solution to the energy problem. By Amit Asaravala.