Is age really just a number? Hundreds of “aging clocks” developed over the last 10–15 years suggest that it is. These clocks aim to measure biological age rather than chronological age—initially using DNA methylation, more recent examples use, e.g., blood proteins. A recent preprint goes a step further by developing “tissue clocks” that predict the biological age of different human tissues from images or even blood samples. The authors reason that tissue structure, with its direct links to physiological fitness,…

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Consider whether you would read an article that reached a conclusion like this: “Our results thus reveal a range of strategies for investing resources in the most expensive machines at the heart of this process.” I probably wouldn’t, since words like “invest” and “expensive” are—shall we say—unattractive to me. But what if the sentence is actually this: “Our results thus reveal a range of strategies for investing resources in the molecular machines at the heart of cellular self-replication.” That’s a…

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Bats are wonders. These are mammals with powered flight, a group of species with a diverse array of senses (sonar!) and lifestyles, that dart around the Sonoran desert where I live, eating flying insects and pollinating native plants. Okay, so they’re also vast reservoirs of coronaviruses, but even that is wildly interesting. Consider a new paper in Nature that just added ten new bat genomes to the genomeosphere (it’s part of an effort called Bat1K; what a time to be…

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