Scientists have found new chemistry that could hint at the origins of Life on Earth, and in turn, our ancestry.

Yodit Feseha looks at the numbers that underlie much of nature, and how we see beauty

From the origin of life through to the development of language and culture, Charlotte Mykura explores the rise of human beings

Yodit Feseha tells us how ageing works and if it’s possible to reverse it
(taken from the latest issue of I,Science magazine)

Mutations are ticks on the molecular clock, and can now be used to measure evolutionary distances

Our DNA endures a constant bombardment of damaging agents, so how does it cope? …

This is the story of how telomeres determine our lifespan, but can they help ‘cure’ aging? …

Find out the latest on bringing back extinct species and perhaps one day; a Neanderthal …

We are constantly reminded of the looming, ominous and terrible prospect of cancer …

The company xHumed imagines digitally resurrecting great minds from the past to help us solve current problems …

If all of the cells in the human body contain exactly the same genes, then why don’t all of our body parts look exactly the same? …

The challenge of studying long-dead species could have the surprisingly simple solution of museomics …

Part of the Imperial Festival podcast series: Senja Barthel uses mathematics to discover more about knots …

Epigenetics questions the notion that genes are the only inherited information and could lead to acquiring superhuman abilities …

Part of the Imperial Festival podcast series: Stefan Croniszewski talks to us about uses for this new wonder material …

Women throughout the ages have helped to shape our understanding of science. Here are six of the most influential …

The whole human genome is printed in several volumes at the Wellcome Collection, but it may not be as complete as you’d think …

India Renziehausen saw Professor Adrian Bird present his prize winning work on Rett syndrome at the Royal Society …

‘Science Cafe’ on sixty years since DNA’s structure was discovered, while Dame Sue Ion talks about the nuclear industry in ‘The Life Scientific’ …

How much should we know about the genomes of our unborn children? Recent advances in prenatal testing have ethical implications …

Harmful bacteria selectively ‘eat’ DNA to build antibiotic resistance. The discovery could help prevent outbreaks of meningitis …

Polygraph tests are used across many industries and are often relied on during police investigations. But are they are reliable?

Reports of the first direct images of single strands of DNA proved to be not quite what they seemed. But does it really matter?

The Cell Cycle is the process by which cells grow and then divide to form new cells. This cell division happens throughout our bodies; from the production of new blood cells in our bone marrow to the generation of new layers of skin cells. In this video we talked to Professor Peter Burgers about his work on […]

This new technology presents huge – but not insurmountable – policy challenges…

Cancer has been a monumental target for medical research – in the West it’s a leading cause of death, and is highly feared. But this reputation isn’t necessarily earned. A large number of patients arrive in clinic with the secret apprehension that it could be the ‘big C’ despite the fact heart disease is the […]

In 2000, the human genome, a manuscript containing all the genes that make us human, was completed at a cost of $3 billion dollars. At a cost of nearly $1 a letter, this makes it the costliest script ever bought (its worthiest competitor being Audubon’s ‘Birds of America’, sold for $11.5 million). What, apart from […]

Yesterday afternoon, I went to the cinema to watch The Amazing Spider-Man. When the words “DNA” and “recombination” popped up during the film, I got excited and started thinking. I later asked myself: In reality, how close are we to creating artificial hybrid species? Let’s briefly revisit the idea of Spider-Man, a.k.a. Peter Parker. Parker […]

Karin Valencia is a PhD student in Imperial’s DNA Topology research group. The term ‘DNA structure’ may bring to mind any number of things, from the television drama CSI to the famous double helix. Perhaps less familiar are the ‘higher-order’ structural features of DNA, namely knots. DNA in nature can be found to be ‘knotted’ […]

Posthumously, Lonesome George has become a very famous tortoise. Believed to be the last of his subspecies, and often billed as the rarest creature on Earth, he has served as something of a poster boy for endangered species all over the world. We still know relatively little about the effects that the environment has on […]