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26 articles
  • gene data

    Genetics

    Big Data Helps Find the Achilles Heel of Each Individual Cancer

    In January, the pharmaceutical company Roche paid more than a billion dollars to buy about half of a small company called Foundation Medicine. Foundation has not invented any new drugs or life-saving devices. Most insurance companies won’t pay for its main product, and like a lot of biotech companies, it loses money.The big bucks are for […]

  • Watrous discussion

    Communication

    5 Languages That Could Change the Way You See the World

    How habits of speech can shape our thoughts.

  • foal Madigan squeeze

    Neuroscience

    How Odd Behavior in Some Young Horses May Reveal a Cause of Autism

    By gently squeezing maladjusted foals, veterinary researcher John Madigan recreates the experience of traveling through the birth canal, lowering the levels of certain neurosteroids and “waking up” the young horses.Joe Proudman / UC Davis As a toxicologist at the University of California, Davis, Isaac Pessah focuses on how different molecules regulate human brain function and […]

  • conformity

    Psychology

    The Death of Hundreds Is Just a Statistic—But It Doesn’t Have to Be

    Imagine that tomorrow I were to show you a newspaper article describing a deadly wildfire. Do you think you’d be more upset upon reading that 10,000 people died than if you read that five people died? This scenario makes people engage in affective forecasting—predicting their future emotional states. We expect that hearing about 10,000 deaths […]

  • GATTACA is here

    Communication

    Is DNA the Language of the Book of Life?

    Thinking of nucleobases as a long sequence of letters may contribute to the illusion that DNA is a language.Neil Palmer / CIAT via Flickr When we talk about genes, we often use expressions inherited from a few influential geneticists and evolutionary biologists, including Francis Crick, James Watson, and Richard Dawkins. These expressions depict DNA as […]

  • Livio_HERO

    Astronomy

    Mario Livio on 25 Years of Hubble

    The astrophysicist looks at the history of the world’s most famous telescope.