Zettabytes—that’s 10 21 bytes—of data are currently generated every year. All of those cat videos have to be stored somewhere, and DNA is a great storage medium; it has amazing data density and is ...

Artificial intelligence has gotten a bad reputation lately, and often for good reason. But a team of scientists at Google’s DeepMind now claims to have found a revolutionary use case for AI: helping ...

Nearly 25 years after scientists completed a draft human genome sequence, many of its 3.1 billion letters remain a puzzle. The 98% of the genome that is not made of protein-coding genes — but which ...

The puzzle seems impossible: take a three-billion-letter code and predict what happens if you swap a single letter. The code we’re talking about—the human genome—stores most of its instructions in ...

In a way, sequencing DNA is very simple: There's a molecule, you look at it, and you write down what you find. You'd think it would be easy—and, for any one letter in the sequence, it is. The problem ...