biology

A study from Rockefeller University reveals that fruit flies track odor plumes by edge tracking rather than the traditional surge-and-cast model, using a virtual reality treadmill to map their behavior.

Scientists have discovered a 'third state' between life and death, where certain cells can adapt and reorganize after an organism dies, given the right environment.

Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 achieves state-of-the-art results across computational biology, protein modeling, and wet-lab reasoning, positioning it as a general-purpose AI biology agent.

Researchers discovered that naked mole-rat queens secrete a chemical called isopropyl myristate to suppress fertility in other females and maintain colony social order, overturning the previous belief that bullying was the primary mechanism.

Researchers quantitatively assessed for the first time that somatic mutations alone cap human lifespan at 146–194 years, with brain and heart cells as the main bottleneck, while the liver could last millennia.

Alexander Kalian argues that biology lacks sufficient high-quality data for AI, while César de la Fuente counters that data exists but needs better organization, highlighting the AllTheBacteria preprint as an open platform for bacterial genomes.

A preprint arguing that AI can map known biology but cannot perform 'kind formation'—the minting of new variables and constraints—which requires the embodied engagement of human scientists. The authors propose a curriculum to train scientists as 'detectors of the unparameterized' to complement AI in biological discovery.

TheBioCollection is a 52.6B-token pre-training corpus for biology that consolidates heterogeneous resources into a unified format for training large language models, and includes a matched evaluation suite. Training on this corpus more than doubles overall scores on biology benchmarks while preserving general language ability.

Scientists discovered a previously unseen nitrogen-fixing bacteria, solving a decades-long mystery and challenging a fundamental rule of biology.

The screwworm, a flesh-eating parasite, has re-emerged in the US for the first time since the 1980s after the sterile male fly barrier at the Darien Gap failed, prompting renewed eradication efforts.

An introductory guide to genomics written for engineers and computer scientists, covering cells, chromosomes, DNA, and genes using a bakery analogy.

Scientists at the University of Minnesota have created SpudCells, synthetic cells that feed, grow, reproduce, and compete, marking a major advance in synthetic biology. The work is described in a 190-page preprint under journal review.

This paper introduces sparse autoencoders to resolve superposition in neural networks, improving interpretability and geometric fidelity of latent spaces, and presents GW-map for cross-modal alignment between image representations and single-cell RNA sequencing data.

A roundup of six scientific stories from June, including the physics of soccer feints, the distinctive shape of poop, boron buckyballs, and the drag crisis affecting the World Cup ball.

Scientists have discovered how wombats produce cube-shaped feces, solving a long-standing mystery about the biological mechanism behind their unique digestive process.

This paper introduces GRAFT, a curated multimodal dataset linking gene expression profiles and phenotypic traits in Arabidopsis thaliana, along with graph and hypergraph benchmarks for phenotype prediction. It aims to advance genome-to-phenome mapping in plant biology.

A cloud lab for biology allows running experiments via API in minutes, eliminating the need for expensive automation engineers and long setup times, enabling solo founders to conduct thousands of drug screens quickly.

NVIDIA launches the BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, an open toolkit that enables AI agents to perform tasks like protein structure prediction, molecular docking, and generative chemistry, accelerating programmable biology in collaboration with Arc Institute.

BioMatrix is a multimodal foundation model that unifies molecular sequences, structures, and natural language in a single decoder-only architecture, achieving state-of-the-art performance on 77 out of 80 biological tasks.

This article explores the mechanisms behind the coordinated movement of flocking birds and schools of fish, discussing the principles of collective behavior.