Experiments that make viruses more virulent or contagious present significant risks. Are those risks worth the rewards?

Brooke Borel: So Tom originally came to me with this idea for this podcast to dig into scientific controversies in a ...

The CDC is piloting a disease forecasting service called Insight Net. Could it be a game-changer for public health?

From pathogen research to geoengineering and AI, consequential science is accelerating. Whose hands are on the wheel?

Farmers and health experts say it’s complicated. RFK Jr.’s milk adviser, Mark McAfee, says he’s up for the challenge.

All of Undark's journalism in one place.

In August, 1945, American pilots dropped newly engineered atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, evaporating tens of thousands of people in an instant, and killing many tens of thousands more in the ...

William C. Thompson does not ordinarily hunt for bugs, and his scrutiny of a type of computational algorithm that analyze DNA started out innocently enough. Investigators used software in a case from ...

In the late 1980s, at a federal research facility in Pensacola, Florida, Tamar Barkay used mud in a way that proved revolutionary in a manner she could never have imagined at the time: a crude version ...