On May 27, 1961, Heinrich Matthaei, a postdoc working with NIH scientist Marshal Nirenberg, placed synthetic polyuracil RNA into 20 test tubes to see what it would produce. Each tube contained ...

Scientists have marveled at the ingenuity of the DNA code since it was first deciphered in the early sixties, but now it appears that there is much more to it than previously known. A research team at ...

Orangutans, mice, and horses are covered with it, but humans aren't. Why we have significantly less body hair than most other mammals has long remained a mystery. But a first-of-its-kind comparison of ...

The genetics of a marine protozoan may overturn one of the long-held tenets of protein synthesis. According to conventional wisdom, the genetic code is unambiguous: each DNA triplet, or codon, ...

The DNA of nearly all life on Earth is made up of 64 codons, each one a sequence of three nucleotide bases, the building blocks of DNA. These codons contain instructions for building amino acids, ...

Darwin's theory of evolution should be expanded to include consideration of a DNA stability 'energy code' -- so-called 'molecular Darwinism' -- to further account for the long-term survival of species ...