Biology

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A little bird told her: scientist wins $100,000 prize for decoding birdsong

Julie Elie worked out how zebra finches announce who they are, what they are doing and use individual signaturesA scientist who decoded the dictionary that a bird uses to communicate has won a $100,000 prize for making progress towards a world in which humans can talk to the animals – without being met with a […]

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AI could help win ‘race against extinction’ of vital plants, say botanists

Tech is helping to identify and save new specimens and could open ‘genomic goldmine’ of fungi dataThe rise of AI and digitisation could be a turning point in the “race against extinction” faced by botanists trying to identify and save vital plants before they vanish, according to a major report from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.New

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OpenAI starts offering a biology-tuned LLM

On Thursday, OpenAI announced it had developed a large language model specifically trained on common biology workflows. Called GPT-Rosalind after Rosalind Franklin, the model appears to differ from most science-focused models from major tech companies, which have generally taken a more generic approach that works for various fields. In a press briefing, Yunyun Wang, OpenAI’s

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MIT engineers design proteins by their motion, not just their shape

Proteins are far more than nutrients we track on a food label. Present in every cell of our bodies, they work like nature’s molecular machines. They walk, stretch, bend, and flex to do their jobs, pumping blood, fighting disease, building tissue, and many other jobs too small for the eye to see. Their power doesn’t

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Can scientists really resurrect the dodo? Inside the company that says they can

Colossal Biosciences’ CEO says its work follows a ‘moral obligation’ while critics say it’s ‘tech bro’ hype that could undermine conservationCan and should we resurrect animal species that have been extinct for thousands of years? Such weighty, existential questions were once the preserve of science fiction but are now being played out within an unassuming

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3 Questions: Building predictive models to characterize tumor progression

Just as Darwin’s finches evolved in response to natural selection in order to endure, the cells that make up a cancerous tumor similarly counter selective pressures in order to survive, evolve, and spread. Tumors are, in fact, complex sets of cells with their own unique structure and ability to change. Today, artificial Intelligence and machine learning

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Large genome model: Open source AI trained on trillions of bases

Late in 2025, we covered the development of an AI system called Evo that was trained on massive numbers of bacterial genomes. So many that, when prompted with sequences from a cluster of related genes, it could correctly identify the next one or suggest a completely novel protein. That system worked because bacteria tend to

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AI to help researchers see the bigger picture in cell biology

Studying gene expression in a cancer patient’s cells can help clinical biologists understand the cancer’s origin and predict the success of different treatments. But cells are complex and contain many layers, so how the biologist conducts measurements affects which data they can obtain. For instance, measuring proteins in a cell could yield different information about the

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Katie Spivakovsky wins 2026 Churchill Scholarship

MIT senior Katie Spivakovsky has been selected as a 2026-27 Churchill Scholar and will undertake an MPhil in biological sciences at the Wellcome Sanger Institute at Cambridge University in the U.K. this fall.Spivakovsky, who is double-majoring in biological engineering and artificial intelligence, with minors in mathematics and biology, aims to integrate computation and bioengineering in

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Google DeepMind launches AI tool to help identify genetic drivers of disease

AlphaGenome can analyse up to 1m letters of DNA code at once and could pave way for new treatmentsResearchers at Google DeepMind have unveiled their latest artificial intelligence tool and claimed it will help scientists identify the genetic drivers of disease and ultimately pave the way for new treatments.AlphaGenome predicts how mutations interfere with the

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