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Early progress on accelerating drug development with Claude
Anthropic's life sciences team reports on research partnerships with BigHat Biosciences, Bristol Myers Squibb, Divergence Labs, Enveda, Generate Biomedicines and The Column Group, with case studies spanning modality engineering, hit generation, lead optimisation, manufacturing filings, company creation and clinical trial planning, plus its own drug discovery programmes.
8 min · 1,874 words
Dam Removals Are Bringing Fish Back Across the Northeastern United StatesStriking down one tiny barrier at a time
Ben Goldfarb for Smithsonian Magazine on how removing small, obsolete dams across the Northeast is letting herring and other fish return—even when the West’s big dam demolitions get the headlines.
18 min · 4,037 words
E. coli chemotaxis: the baffling intelligence of a single cell
James Somers tells the story of how a single E. coli cell forages for nutrients through chemotaxis: its run-and-tumble swimming, the receptor and signaling proteins that give it something like smell, drive and memory, adaptation through methylation, and why this one phenomenon is a good way into understanding biology as a whole.
28 min · 6,437 words
'Jonathan' Is the Oldest Land Animal on Earth. He Could Hold the Secrets to Defying Death
404 Media's Becky Ferreira covers a Science Advances study that sequenced the genome of Jonathan, a roughly 194-year-old Aldabra giant tortoise on Saint Helena, and what the findings suggest about the genetics of extreme longevity, including how researchers obtained a sample and how the work could inform human healthspan research.
3 min · 671 words
Open data for predictive AI models of biology: $1.8 billion committed
Biohub, the U.S. Department of Energy, NIH, Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Meta expand the Virtual Biology Initiative to a combined $1.8 billion in funding, data, compute and measurement technology, aiming to generate open, standardized datasets for AI models that predict how cells respond to interventions.
5 min · 1,201 words
Loss of cell identity drives human aging: Two new papers
Eric Topol on two new papers (Nature and Cell) arguing loss of cell identity is a central driver of human aging—what the Gladyshev and Izpisua Belmonte teams found and why it matters for longevity science.
8 min · 1,753 words
Surprisingly Complex Waves Reveal the Brain's Inner Workings
Unexpected patterns traveling across the human brain may be reorganizing its activity in real time.
9 min · 2,113 words
SynthID Bio: Watermarking methods for synthetic biology
Introducing SynthID Bio Proof of concept for watermarking AIgenerated proteins while preserving biological function. Today, we’re introducing SynthID Bio to bring watermarking technology to synthetic biology.
6 min · 1,276 words
What's Earth's dominant species by mass?
Signore Galilei works through biomass estimates to find which single species weighs the most: humans outweigh ants, cattle top the animals ahead of humans and Antarctic krill, sugar cane leads crops, and boreal trees such as black spruce and Dahurian larch hold billions of tonnes, far more carbon than all animals combined.
4 min · 935 words
Lab on a Contact Lens Can Measure Stress Through Serotonin
IEEE Spectrum covers a smart contact lens that aims to measure serotonin as a stress biomarker, part of a broader push toward continuous body-chemistry sensing.
4 min · 960 words
Why is the human body so crap except for the liver?
Dynomight asks why the liver regenerates so well while most human tissues heal poorly, surveying biology, evolution, and regenerative medicine.
20 min · 4,636 words
Biology Might Not Be Quantum, but Its Math Is Quantumlike
Elise Cutts for Quanta Magazine explores how biological systems may not rely on quantum physics, yet often obey quantumlike mathematics—interference, contextuality, and what that means for modeling life.
11 min · 2,523 words
Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats
Anthropic’s new life sciences lab reports Claude agents autonomously finding an RT-associated enzyme system (ART) with CRISPR-like RNA-repeat arrays in jumbo-phage DNA—early, still-uncharacterized biology shared to invite follow-on work.
7 min · 1,610 words
How Zambia Approved an HIV Drug in 12 Days
How Zambia’s medicines regulator authorized an HIV drug in 12 days—and what that says about the access gap when medicines sit where the disease is not.
16 min · 3,572 words
Weeping whales: Stillborn humpback whale grieving documented
Researchers document a humpback whale appearing to grieve a stillborn calf, adding rare observational evidence to debates about cetacean emotion and maternal behavior.
2 min · 407 words
The Millennium Problems for Biology
A proposed set of millennium-scale open problems for biology—framed as hard, motivating challenges analogous to the Clay Mathematics Millennium Prize Problems.
7 min · 1,615 words
Do birds have accents? The fascinating regional differences in birdsong
Zoologist Louise Gentle explains how birdsong dialects vary by region—why accents form, how they spread, and what they reveal about learning and culture in birds.
4 min · 910 words
Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds
Stanford Medicine–led research finds the human brain is two distinct organs—the cerebrum and the brainstem—opening new avenues for studying diseases that selectively affect the brainstem.
5 min · 1,248 words
Meet the First New Cat Species Discovered in 100 Years
Jason Bittel reports on a small spotted tiger cat from Bolivia—identified through sanctuary work and genetics—that may signal a broader wave of newly recognized small-cat species.
7 min · 1,553 words
Ctenophores Aren’t Just Beautiful. They’re Biological Wonders.Comb jellies illuminate early nervous systems and bioluminescence
Marlowe Starling reports how comb jellies (ctenophores) help biologists probe the earliest animal nervous systems, membrane chemistry, and bioluminescence—organisms as distant from us as we are from jellyfish.
2 min · 465 words