Mysteries around Jupiter’s Great Red Spot have been swirling for centuries. No one is sure when the tremendous whirl—the largest and longest-lived storm in our current solar system, with a diameter wider than planet Earth and wind speeds of more than 260 miles per hour—began. Or why it’s red. Or even who first observed it (was it a 17th-century Italian...

This article originally appeared in  Knowable Magazine.Evolutionary geneticist and choral singer Jenny Graves has performed Joseph Haydn’s masterpiece, The Creation, on many occasions. The famous oratorio chronicles the seven days of biblical creation as described in the Book of Genesis. Yet Graves, who has spent the past 60 years studying the wonders...

Since CRISPR was introduced 14 years ago by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, now Nobel laureates, the gene-editing breakthrough has been used to improve therapies for cancer, heart disease, and sickle cell anemia. Surprising applications for CRISPR are being found every year, including reviving veggies to feed a warming planet. Recently,...

Can the path of a child’s life—things like their future grade point average—be predicted using computer models?In theory, this idea isn’t outlandish. In today’s digital world, algorithms are often trained to predict the health outcomes of patients, or how likely someone is to pay back their loans. So a team of researchers wondered whether this sort...

1 Machines Can Learn!A few years ago, I decided I needed to learn how to code simple machine learning algorithms. I had been writing about machine learning as a journalist, and I wanted to understand the nuts and bolts. (My background as a software engineer came in handy.) One of my first projects was to build a rudimentary neural network to try to...

Early next year, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service plans to send sharpshooters to the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Their target: barred owls, whom they will lure into range with electronic calls and then kill—the opening salvos of a slaughter that is expected to continue for 30 years and claim 470,000 lives. The reason for the carnage?...