The story of how we grew wise to the wisdom of insect trails begins, oddly enough, with the lowly caterpillar. One spring day in 1738, a young Genevan philosophy student named Charles…

When H.G. Wells wrote about aliens, his wild imaginings were shaped by Darwin’s theory of evolution. In The War of the Worlds, giant Martian invaders with whip-like arms are threatened…

It can be foolish to anthropomorphize the natural world. Perhaps the most frequent version of this failing is when people attribute human thoughts and emotions to animal behavior.…

Darwin’s finches are in trouble. Climate change and globalization have drastically affected their habitats on the Galapagos Islands. In the 1960s, we introduced, most likely through…

For years, Ali Khodadoust walked around with his heart literally open to the world. In 2012 surgeons replaced his aortic arch and unknowingly planted bacteria. The bacteria secreted…

The former Luis Guillermo Baptiste began her transformation into Brigitte in the mid 1990s, when she was part of a cadre of scientists helping to establish the Bogota-based Humboldt…

Testosterone gets a pretty bad reputation. It’s been long known as the hormone of aggression. In his 1998 book, The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of…

Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” (1490)FlickrIn May this year, Curtis Cetrulo, a plastic-reconstructive surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, performed the first penis…

Almost exactly a year ago, I attended the International Summit of Human Gene Editing at the National Academy of Sciences. It was organized in part by Jennifer Doudna, arguably one…

The year was 1962, and it seemed like cell biologist Leonard Hayflick had made a mistake. After all, for 60 years it had been known that human cells were immortal, capable of dividing…