How to Build a Strep A Vaccine After decades of scientific and regulatory delays, several Strep A vaccine candidates are entering clinical trials. Without further funding for phase 3 studies, however, many will be hamstrung.

Read: press.asimov.com/articles/strep

New Essay: How to Build a Strep A Vaccine

Strep A is "one of the most important, neglected, and tractable pathogens to work on," says @JacobTref. Its disease burden rivals HIV/AIDS, yet annual funding is just $14M (vs. $1.5B for HIV).

How can we finally make a vaccine?

A Brief History of Lab Notebooks How experimental recordings have changed, from the Renaissance through today.

Newton took his stepfather's book and "began adding his own prolific...notes on mathematical problems."

In the following centuries, from Faraday to Pavlov, lab notebooks evolved a lot. Excellent new piece by @ulkar_aghayeva.

Read: www.asimov.press/p/lab-noteb...

A Brief History of Lab Notebooks

Early lab notebooks were little more than pocket diaries, where "thinkers" collected quotes from classical Latin authors. Newton's first notebook was adapted from his stepfather's commonplace book (filled with "excerpted scriptural commentary")..

A Brief History of Bioinformatics Software How computer scientists on the fringes of biology made sense of sequencing data.

Read: www.asimov.press/p/bioinform...

New essay: A Brief History of Bioinformatics Software

Although the word "bioinformatics" wasn't coined until 1970, the first computer program to analyze protein sequences, named COMPROTEIN, was published in 1962.

From our forthcoming book, "Making the Modern Laboratory."

Metaphors for Biology: Evolution A series of quantitative metaphors on the speeds of representative events in evolutionary biology. The end of our three-part series.

In this context, the Industrial Revolution began 10 seconds ago. Modern domestic dogs evolved 1-2 minutes ago. And mushrooms first evolved 40 years ago.

Read: press.asimov.com/articles/me...

In this final article of our Metaphors series, Sam Clamons imagines that one generation = one second. Then, he examines both artificial and natural selection. By standardizing evolution against a consistent “ruler," it’s much easier to grasp the vast time scales involved.

Second, the time it takes for a thing to evolve depends, largely, on random chance; a cell accidentally skipping a base in DNA replication or a tortoise, swept away in a storm, happening to land on an island full of edible ferns.

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Metaphors for Biology: Evolution

It’s difficult to think about evolution. "Years” seems like an inaccurate unit for expressing evolutionary rates because evolution considers changes between one generation and the next. And yet, every organism has a unique generation time.

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We're pausing @AsimovPress for awhile.

Thanks to everyone who has taken this journey with us so far. We will plan to see you again in a few months :)

Read: www.asimov.press/p/pause

How to Design Antibodies A step-by-step guide to making de novo binders.

A few years ago, designing an antibody on the computer was extremely difficult.

Today, there are several open-source tools which allow anyone to design antibodies from home.

Our latest article, by Brian Naughton, is a step-by-step guide to antibody design: press.asimov.com/articles/an...

A Visual Guide to DNA Sequencing How to “read” nucleic acids, from Sanger to nanopores.

Read & subscribe: press.asimov.com/articles/dn...

A Visual Guide to DNA Sequencing.

Learn how different DNA sequencing technologies work, from Sanger sequencing to Illumina to nanopores. (Complete with illustrations!)

Written by Evan DeTurk. Illustrated by Ella Watkins-Dulaney.

Baseline Drift A eulogy to the reference human.

Read & subscribe: press.asimov.com/articles/ba...

The Institute for Human Reference was founded in 2053.

Their goal? To "define the reference human."

The task, of course, proved impossible. For decades, humans had quietly been altered in hundreds of ways. Averages were no longer clinically useful.

[New Fiction] BASELINE DRIFT

How Nature Became a 'Prestige' Journal Since launching in 1869, Nature has evolved from a periodical offering commentary on pigeons to the prestige journal in science. But how did Nature build its reputation, and can it last?

Read the full article & preview all pieces in Issue 09: www.asimov.press/p/nature

How did @Nature become "prestigious" to scientists?

In our opening article of Issue 09, writer Robert Reason traces the journal's history.

By understanding how Nature’s prestige was constructed, we can also clarify which elements are deserved and which are entrenched.

Why the FDA Is Slow to Remove Drugs On the 90-year saga of oral phenylephrine.

Also our final article in Issue 08! Written by Michael DePeau-Wilson
( @MedReporterMike )

Read & subscribe: www.asimov.press/p/drug-remo...

Phenylephrine, marketed as a nasal decongestant, was first sold in the U.S. in 1938.

In 2007, a formal petition was filed to have it removed based on evidence showing it did not work. The FDA (finally) pulled it until 2024.

This is the 90-year saga of an ineffective drug.

A Most Important Mustard On the origins of Arabidopsis thaliana, the premier model for plant biology.

www.asimov.press/p/arabidopsis

Arabidopsis thaliana, plant biology's ubiquitous model organism, came from the Harz Mountains of northern Germany.

It was discovered in 1542 by Johannes Thal and, over the next 500 years, spread through labs around the world.

@AlexandraBalwit tells the story in a new essay.🔻

Out today: A broad-coverage antivenom, made by mixing eight different antibodies from a llama and alpaca, protects mice against snakebites from 17 of 18 deadly species in Africa.

The antivenom outperformed a WHO-approved remedy that is already on the market.

Read: www.asimov.press/p/broad-ant...

Making the Electron Microscope In a little over a century, the electron microscope evolved from a tool barely capable of resolving virus particles into one able to capture atomic detail.

Read & subscribe: press.asimov.com/articles/el...

Electron microscopes are one of the great feats of human engineering.

These towering metal tubes, filled with detectors and electromagnetic coils, are used to image the smallest of molecules.

Our latest essay by Smrithi Sunil is a deep dive into the making of these machines.

The Price of E. coli Bioengineers commonly view microbes as reprogrammable “cellular factories” for manufacturing high-value molecules. But what are we throwing away?

A new quantitative essay from Sam Clamons.

Read & subscribe: press.asimov.com/articles/pr...

Scientists often engineer microbes, like E. coli, to make drugs and other molecules.

But what if, instead, we could isolate ALL the components of a cell into little vials and sell them? How much would, say, 1 liter of cells be worth?

The answer, it turns out, is about $600,000.

We previously published an interactive about the repressilator, a type of gene circuit.

You can drag sliders to learn how promoters, decay rates, and other parameters affect its behavior.

We'd like to publish more digital interactives like this. So what should we make next?

Asimov Press 2025 Survey Your feedback will significantly shape our coverage!

We're planning to scale up next year, with lots more articles and multimedia formats (and books).

We'd love to hear from you before then. What articles do you like, what do you not like, and how can we do better?

1-minute survey: forms.gle/FSePEaW1rxD...

Asimov Press 2025 Survey Your feedback will significantly shape our coverage!

We're planning to scale up next year, with lots more articles and multimedia formats (and books).

We'd love to hear from you before then. What articles do you like, what do you not like, and how can we do better?

1-minute survey: forms.gle/FSePEaW1rxD...