DNA contains foundational information needed to sustain life. Understanding how this information is stored and organized has been one of the greatest scientific challenges of the last century. With ...

Marc Lajoie is working on a new type of genetically engineered life: organisms that read a new language of DNA. That is, they have the same letters in their DNA—A,C,G, and T—but they read and ...

Biological engineers have created a programming language that allows them to rapidly design complex, DNA-encoded circuits that give new functions to living cells. MIT biological engineers have created ...

Scientists have long believed that DNA tells the cells how to make proteins. But the discovery of a new, second DNA code overnight suggests the body speaks two different languages. The findings in the ...

It’s tricky studying the history of a time when no one wrote things down. Archaeology pieces together how people lived in the past by studying artifacts they left behind; linguistics by analyzing ...

61 years ago today, the molecular structure of DNA was revealed to the world in the pages of Nature. The double helix is now emblematic of the programming language of life, and our understanding of ...

MIT biological engineers have devised a programming language that can be used to give new functions to E. coli bacteria. [Janet Iwasa, MIT] From the synthetic biologist’s point of view, living cells ...

WHEN SECRETARY of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in an unintentionally comedic justification of the U.S. invasion of Iraq during a press conference in May 2002, said "There are things we don't know we don't ...