Katherine Unger Baillie

When the human genome was first sequenced, experts predicted they would find about 100,000 genes. The actual number has turned out to be closer to 20,000, just a few thousand more than fruit flies have. The question logically arose: how can a relatively small number of genes lay the blueprint for the complexities of the human body?

At the turn of the millennium, the cost to sequence a single human genome exceeded $50 million, and the process took a decade to complete. Microbes have genomes, too, and the first reference genome for a malaria parasite was completed in 2002 at a cost of roughly $15 million. But today researchers can sequence a genome in a single afternoon for just a few thousand dollars.

Philadelphia is home to many beautiful waterways, from the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers to the Wissahickon and Cobbs creeks. A visit to their banks affords city dwellers a chance to escape the concrete jungle to fish, hike, picnic, or let their dogs romp and roam.

By Madeleine Stone   @themadstoneScience fiction is often said to reflect human culture: who we are today and what we dream to be in the future. But those who write on the future also have a hand in shaping it. Indeed, many future thinkers of the past have predicted technologies of the present with uncanny accuracy.

For the millions of people around the world with inherited forms of blindness, the path toward a gradually dimming world may seem inexorable. But a new therapy that melds chemical and genetic approaches offers hope for restoring vision, even in patients whose world has gone dark.

By Madeleine Stone  @themadstone

A new chemical-genetic therapy restores light responses to the retinas of blind mice and dogs and enables the mice to guide their behavior according to visual cues, setting the stage for clinical trial in humans.

This past March, tens of thousands of people around the world tuned in to the School of Veterinary Medicine’s “foal cam” to welcome Boone, a leggy colt born to mare My Special Girl at the New Bolton Center campus in Kennett Square, Pa.

By Madeleine Stone  @themadstone

Last year, University of Pennsylvania researchers Alexander J. Stewart and Joshua B.