John Rennie
New Clues to Chemical Origins of Metabolism at Dawn of Life
The ingredients for reactions ancestral to metabolism could have formed very easily in the primordial soup, October 2020 work suggests.
Nobel Awarded for Lithium-Ion Batteries and Portable Power
John Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing lithium-ion batteries, “the hidden workhorses of the mobile era.”
Nobel Prize Awarded for Cancer Immunotherapy
James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for developing ways to unleash the immune system more effectively against cancers.
Three Biochemists Win Chemistry Nobel for Directing Evolution
By using the power of evolution to solve practical problems, three researchers opened new avenues to chemical discovery.
CRISPR Gene-Editing Pioneers Win Kavli Prize for Nanoscience
The inventors of a “Swiss army knife” for genome editing received prestigious honors, as did pioneering scientists in astrophysics and neuroscience.
Artificial Neural Nets Grow Brainlike Navigation Cells
Faced with a navigational challenge, neural networks spontaneously evolved units resembling the grid cells that help living animals find their way.
Brains Cling to Old Habits When Learning New Tricks
Using a brain-computer interface, scientists are beginning to learn why learning is hard.
Evolution Saves Species From “Kill the Winner” Disasters
Modelers find evidence that a combination of competition, predation, and evolution will push ecosystems toward species diversity anywhere in the universe.
Supercool Protein Imaging Gets the Nobel Prize
This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to researchers who made it possible to see proteins and other biomolecules at an atomic level of detail.
Nobel Prize Awarded for Biological Clock Discoveries
Three U.S. biologists share the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their research into the molecular mechanism that drives circadian rhythm.