Scientists developed Evo 2, a large biological foundation model trained on about 9 trillion DNA base pairs that can analyse ...

Chalk up another victory for “Conan the Bacterium”—a rugged germ that fresh research suggests could conquer the solar system.

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 ...

The DNA foundation model Evo 2 has been published in the journal Nature. Trained on the DNA of over 100,000 species across ...

For nearly five decades, Steven Spielberg has helped define what alien stories mean to movie audiences. Sometimes they arrive as cosmic miracles. Sometimes as existential threats. Sometimes as ...

Megan Molteni reports on discoveries from the frontiers of genomic medicine, neuroscience, and reproductive tech. She joined STAT in 2021 after covering health and science at WIRED. You can reach ...

At Davos, the billionaire said his belief that “it might only be us” in the cosmos drives Tesla, SpaceX, and his vision for humanity’s future. Elon Musk proclaimed he’s an alien during a Thursday ...

The search for life beyond our solar system heated up this year when scientists reported a tantalising signal from an exoplanet of a molecule that is known to be produced exclusively by life on Earth.

The afternoon of 7 August 1996 isn’t a time that sticks in many people’s minds. But if things had worked out differently, it might have been etched into our collective memory. At 1.15pm, US President ...

DNA sequencing is one of today's most critical scientific fields, powering leaps in humanity's understanding of genetic causes of cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and diabetes. One issue facing the ...

Science fiction has long speculated about the possibility of first contact with an alien species from a distant world and how we might be able to communicate with them. But what if we simply don’t ...