Evolutionary paleogeneticist Beth Shapiro travels to the cold reaches of the world to find DNA samples of long extinct animals, such as mastodons and saber-toothed tigers. She hopes to learn …

CRISPR: It’s the powerful gene editing technology transforming biomedical research. Fast, cheap and easy to use, it allows scientists to rewrite the DNA in just about any organism—including humans—with tests on human embryos already underway.

In 1955, a young scientist named Mildred Dresselhaus was told “women have no place in physics!”. Despite this, she became the “Queen of Carbon” and a champion of women in …

Brian Greene and Michael Levi discuss revolutionary observations that may upend our cosmological understanding. This program is part of the Big Ideas series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

Our genes strictly dictate our personalities, appearance and diseases. Or do they? Research has revealed that genes can turn on and off; they can be expressed for years and then silenced. Sometimes, they are never activated. And these genetic instructions—how and when DNA is read—can be determined by the experiences of one’s ancestors, even those several generations back.

Neil Turok joins Brian Greene to describe his new ideas for curing the big bang singularity and providing a natural dark matter candidate, all while avoiding the conventional paradigm of …