TV News LIES

James D. Watson, the brilliant but controversial American biologist whose 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA, the molecule of heredity, ushered in the age of genetics and provided the foundation for the biotechnology revolution of the late 20th century, has died at the age of 97.

His death was confirmed by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, where he worked for many years. The New York Times reported that Watson died this week at a hospice on Long Island.

In his later years, Watson's reputation was tarnished by comments on genetics and race that led him to be ostracized by the scientific establishment.

Even as a younger man, he was known as much for his writing and for his enfant-terrible persona − including his willingness to use another scientist's data to advance his own career − as for his science.

His 1968 memoir, "The Double Helix," was a racy, take-no-prisoners account of how he and British physicist Francis Crick were first to determine the three-dimensional shape of DNA. The achievement won the duo a share of the 1962 Nobel Prize in medicine and eventually would lead to genetic engineering, gene therapy and other DNA-based medicine and technology.

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Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025 for the development of a new type of molecular architecture. The constructions they created – metal–organic frameworks – contain large cavities in which molecules can flow in and out. Researchers have used them to harvest water from desert air, extract pollutants from water, capture carbon dioxide and store hydrogen.

An attractive and very spacious studio apartment, specifically designed for your life as a water molecule – this is how an estate agent might describe one of all the metal–organic frameworks that laboratories around the world have developed in recent decades.

Other constructions of this type are tailormade for capturing carbon dioxide, separating PFAS from water, delivering pharmaceuticals in the body or managing extremely toxic gases. Some can trap the ethylene gas from fruit – so they ripen more slowly – or encapsulate enzymes that break down traces of antibiotics in the environment.

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The Nobel physics prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and includes a prize sum totalling 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million) that is shared among the winners if there are several, as is often the case.

The Nobel Prizes were established through the will of Alfred Nobel, who amassed a fortune from his invention of dynamite. Since 1901, with occaPhysics was the first category mentioned in Nobel's will, likely reflecting the prominence of the field during his time. Today, the Nobel Prize in Physics remains widely regarded as the most prestigious award in the discipline.

Past winners of the Nobel physics prize include some of the most influential figures in the history of science, such as Albert Einstein, Pierre and Marie Curie, Max Planck and Niels Bohr, himself a pioneer of quantum theory.

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Kate Adamala had been working on something dangerous.

At her synthetic biology lab, Adamala had been taking preliminary steps toward creating a living cell from scratch with one key twist: all the organism's building blocks would be flipped. Changing these molecules would create an unnatural mirror image of a cell, as different as your right hand from your left.

The endeavor was not only a fascinating research challenge, but could be used to improve biotechnology and medicine. But as Adamala and her colleagues talked with biosecurity experts about the project, grave concerns began brewing.

"They started to ask questions like 'have you considered what happens if that cell gets released or what would happen if it infected a human?'" said Adamala, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota. They hadn't.

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Bret Adee is one of the largest beekeepers in the US, with 2 billion bees across 55,000 hives. The business has been in his family since the 1930s, and sends truckloads of bees across the country from South Dakota, pollinating crops such as almonds, onions, watermelons and cucumbers.

Last December, his bees were wintering in California when the weather turned cold. Bees grouped on top of hives trying to keep warm. “Every time I went out to the beehive there were less and less,” says Adee. “Then a week later, there’d be more dead ones to pick up … every week there is attrition, just continually going down.”

Adee went on to lose 75% of his bees. “It’s almost depressingly sad,” he says. “If we have a similar situation this year – I sure hope we don’t – then we’re in a death spiral.”

It developed into the largest US honeybee die-off on record, with beekeepers losing on average 60% of their colonies, at a cost of $600m (£440m).

Scientists have been scrambling to discover what happened; now the culprits are emerging. A research paper published by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), though not yet peer-reviewed, has found nearly all colonies had contracted a bee virus spread by parasitic mites that appear to have developed resistance to the main chemicals used to control them.

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A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at the Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday.

The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit.