Yathish Achar

For years, scientists assumed their jobs were safe from AI because discovery requires creativity, intuition, and critical thinking. Three recent Nature papers challenge that assumption, showing that AI is beginning to act less like a tool and more like a research collaborator. AI is moving at a pace that no one could have imagined a decade ago. What feels particularly unusual is how quickly it has entered our lives compared with previous technological revolutions. Electricity took nearly 50...

Few scientific papers can match the enormity of James Watson and Francis Crick’s paper on the DNA double helix model, published in the journal Nature on 25 April 1953. This paper described the structural properties of DNA without dwelling much on its functional implications. They provided evidence for these ideas in their second paper, which appeared in the same journal just a month later, on 30 May 1953. This time, they moved beyond describing DNA’s structure to proposing how it copies,...

Most experiments fail. What defines a researcher is not avoiding failure, but staying long enough to understand it. On a sunny afternoon of June 28, 1968, in Berkeley, a scientist was setting up an experiment to understand why DNA rings isolated from bacterial cells were always negatively supercoiled. By the late 1960s, it was fairly well accepted that DNA in a living organism exists in three supercoiled forms: negatively supercoiled, positively supercoiled, and relaxed DNA. The major...