The book ends, as these things always do, with a sigh and a stack of annotated pages. I’ve just closed the cover on Zamyatin’s We, and, like a cigarette slipped into the afterword, there sat Ursula…

Analysis of 25 years of evidence shows most schemes are poor quality and fail to lower emissions

Clams reveal North Atlantic destabilization in the early 20th century and at present.

Understanding the role of humans as ‘ecosystem engineers’ requires a deep-time perspective rooted in evolutionary history and the fossil record. However, no conceptual framework exists for studying th...

Nuclear weapons pose the most acute existential threat to humankind and the biosphere. Both qualitatively and quantitatively, they are uniquely destructive. Their incendiary effects are likely to e...

The rise of antibiotic resistance has necessitated the exploration of unconventional sources of novel antimicrobial agents. One emerging novel frontier is “de-extinct” molecules─bioactive peptides, antibiotics, and other bioactive agents reconstructed from ancient or extinct organisms─an innovative convergence of paleogenomics, paleoproteomics, and synthetic biology. Recent advances in high-throughput DNA sequencing, mass spectrometry, and computational biology have enabled scientists to recover and analyze genetic and protein sequences from long-extinct species, offering unprecedented insights into evolutionary biology and potential applications in medicine, biotechnology, and conservation, including the successful regeneration of antimicrobial molecules from several extinct organisms. While paleogenomics provides the blueprint for reconstructing extinct genomes, paleoproteomics offers complementary insights into gene expression, protein function, and post-translational modifications that are often lost in DNA-based studies. These approaches can yield proteins and metabolites that have been lost to evolution, offering a new reservoir of bioactive compounds that could be used for new strategies in medicine, biotechnology, and synthetic biology. In this report we explore data from the CAS Content Collection to outline the current landscape and research progress in the emerging area of molecular de-extinction, to identify key developing concepts and challenges, and to identify successfully revived de-extinct antimicrobials. We outline the technical approaches to their revival in an effort to understand how this highly innovative strategy helps combat modern multidrug-resistant pathogens as well as the challenges and ethical considerations in deploying ancient molecules.

These Booker nominations respond in part to society’s emphasis on youth – which is commonly reflected in publishing.