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Ryan Collison

I write about cool science and share it here.

Sensory Feedback: Restoring Touch

Sensory Feedback: Restoring Touch

Sensory Feedback: Restoring Touch Nathan Copeland lost his arm in a car accident when he was eighteen years old. Ten years later, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh asked him an extraordinary question: would you like to feel again? They implanted electrodes in his somatosensory cortex—the region of the

mRNA Vaccines: How COVID Changed Everything

mRNA Vaccines: How COVID Changed Everything

mRNA Vaccines: How COVID Changed Everything In 2005, Katalin Karikó was demoted. She'd been working on mRNA therapeutics at the University of Pennsylvania for years—decades, really. The idea was simple: if you could deliver mRNA to cells, you could get them to produce any protein you wanted.

RNA Isn't Just a Messenger—It's Making Decisions

RNA Isn't Just a Messenger—It's Making Decisions

RNA Isn't Just a Messenger—It's Making Decisions In 1958, Francis Crick declared what he called the "Central Dogma" of molecular biology. Information flows in one direction: DNA makes RNA makes protein. That's it. The blueprint encodes the messenger, the messenger directs

The RNA Renaissance

The RNA Renaissance

The RNA Renaissance For fifty years, RNA was the middle child of molecular biology. DNA got the glory—the double helix, the blueprint of life. Proteins got the action—the enzymes, the structure, the machinery that makes cells work. RNA? RNA was the messenger. It carried instructions from DNA to

Synthesis: The Cyborg Future

Synthesis: The Cyborg Future

Synthesis: The Cyborg Future Let's pull it all together. Over the past seven articles, we've tracked neural interfaces from the bleeding edge to the mundane. From Neuralink's first patient playing chess with his mind to the million-plus cochlear implant recipients who barely think

Long Non-Coding RNA: The Dark Matter of the Genome

Long Non-Coding RNA: The Dark Matter of the Genome

Long Non-Coding RNA: The Dark Matter of the Genome In 2012, a massive genomics consortium called ENCODE published its results. They'd spent years cataloging every functional element in the human genome—every piece of DNA that actually does something, not just the protein-coding genes. The headline

RNA Interference: Silencing Genes on Demand

RNA Interference: Silencing Genes on Demand

RNA Interference: Silencing Genes on Demand In 1998, two scientists published a paper that would win them a Nobel Prize and launch an entire industry. Andrew Fire and Craig Mello had been studying gene expression in C. elegans—the tiny nematode worm that molecular biologists love because it's