Powerful new genetic tools allow scientists to alter the DNA of any organism—with tests on human embryos already underway. Even more ambitious, synthetic biologists on the verge of creating the genetic material for a living organism from scratch are setting their long-term sites on fashioning a fully synthetic human genome.

Nowadays, the tools for tracing your family tree have advanced far beyond looking back at names in the family Bible or compiling a scrapbook of paper records. Using your genetic information to find long-lost relatives is easier and cheaper than ever before—and scientists are looking to push the technology even further by analyzing our skin and facial features.

For decades, inflation has been the dominant cosmological scenario, but recently the theory has been subject to competition and critique. Two renowned pioneers of inflation — Alan Guth and Andrei …

In this World Science U Live Session, Nobel laureate, former Director of the National Institutes of Health and former President of Memorial Sloan Kettering, Harold Varmus, M.D., and Brian Greene …

Physicist and mathematician Brian Greene and journalist Faith Salie explore the past and future of the cosmos – from the big bang to the closest science can take us to the very end – …

The first electron microscopes enabled scientists to finally view the nanoworld. But because of limitations in the microscope’s lenses, achieving sharp images of individual atoms was not possible. For 60 …