Nearly 25 years after scientists completed a draft human genome sequence, many of its 3.1 billion letters remain a puzzle. The 98% of the genome that is not made of protein-coding genes — but which ...

The puzzle seems impossible: take a three-billion-letter code and predict what happens if you swap a single letter. The code we’re talking about—the human genome—stores most of its instructions in ...

In 1862, Victor Hugo reportedly wrote to his publisher to ask how his newly published novel Les Misérables was selling, with a single character query: “?” The response: “!” This story of one of the ...