How a surgeon who has been dubbed “Dr. Death” got away with harming patients for a criminally long time. By Laura Beil.

Monsters once inhabited the mysterious fringes of the known world. In our human-dominated present, can they still be found? By Natalie Lawrence.

Decades after a risky Cold War experiment, a scientist lives with secrets. By Raffi Khatchadourian.

A pear seedling selection named Bradford was cloned by the gazillion to become the ubiquitous street tree of America’s postwar suburban expansion. Then it turned invasive. By Adrian Higgins.

What drove Edward Teller to push for a 10,000 megaton hydrogen bomb? By Alex Wellerstein. (Sept. 12, 2012)

We could make people less stinky, more resistant to radiation, even less dependent on food and oxygen. But would the new creature be human? By Jason Pontin.

Memories are transferred from one snail to another in a laboratory. By Shivani Dave.

Mary Shelley's misunderstood masterpiece turns 200. By Ronald Bailey.

The humanzee is both scientifically possible and morally defensible. By David P. Barash.

Crispr’s inventor assesses her creation. By Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley, Saskia Popescu.

Evolution is hard to control — but what if you had a magic wand? By David Freeman.

“’The interesting thing is, if it works, will it last?’ Zayner told me, a GoPro strapped to his head and a Hell or High Watermelon beer on the table as he filled a pipette with the DNA mixture to spread over his skin…” By Kristen V. Brown.

Camp DASH was supposed to be a gold-standard study of diet-mitigated hypertension in adolescents. Instead, it became a venue for chaos. What happened? By Amy Gastelum.

Researchers announce a fully viable bacteria created using expanded DNA repertoire. Steve Fleischfresser reports.

Experts debate what amateur scientists could accomplish with the powerful DNA editing tool—and whether its ready availability is cause for concern. By Annie Sneed.

Etomologist Don Steinkraus takes a look at beetles whose limbs keep moving, despite appearing to be quite dead. What's going on here.

Thanks to CRISPR, scientists are studying animal evolution in ways that were previously thought to be impossible. By Ed Yong.

An early promoter and populariser of Darwin's evolutionary theory, the German biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel was a hugely influential figure of the late 19th century. Bernd Brunner looks at how a trip to Sri Lanka sowed the seeds for not only Haeckel's majestic illustrations from his Art Forms in Nature, for which he is perhaps best known today, but also his disturbing ideas on race and eugenics.

What happened when one of the world’s most unusual, and beloved, computer programmers disappeared. By Annie Lowrey.

It’s the first time RNA interference will be used to kill insect pests. By Sarah Zhang.