What We're Reading

Scientists should acknowledge that emotions and values play a legitimate role in shaping public perceptions of risk.

To better find disease-causing genes, researchers from the Flatiron Institute and Princeton University have developed diseaseQUEST, an integrative approach that combines data from human genome-wide disease studies with in silico network models of tissue- and cell-type-specific function in model organisms.

Scientists worry about how new tools that are enabling them to home in on the genetic basis of hot-button traits like intelligence will be misconstrued to fit racist ideologies.

In this heartfelt essay, an MIT graduate student writes of obsessively laboring to understand the intricacies of frog embryos and how his "monomania" affected his personal life. His adviser had a saying: “You have to believe that Sisyphus was happy.”

With the development of an adaptive, multiview light sheet microscope and a suite of computational tools, researchers have captured the first view of early organ development inside the mouse embryo.

A writer finds out she is on the autism spectrum and comes to understand the challenges it has posed as well as the benefits it has offered.

Her work advances new theories of how celestial collisions give birth to planets and their natural satellites.

Hubble telescope spots faint changes in the light from a star that could signal the presence of a moon around a distant planet.

Scientists may have detected the first moon orbiting a planet in a far-off solar system, though they caution that they still want to confirm the finding with another round of telescope observations.

The mathematician uses probability theory to resolve long-standing problems in statistical physics and computer science.