Niko McCarty

A list of visuals that make science more legible and exciting — interactive essays, paintings, videos, and charts that do real explanatory work.

Three half-baked ideas in biotechnology: hyperspectral biology, engineering beauty, and mapping the air and oceans.

Photonic PCR can run 40 cycles in six minutes.

Why do cloning tools still suck?

Valonia ventricosa, or bubble algae, is the largest single-celled organism on Earth.

I claimed nobody had tried to evolve Vibrio natriegens to grow faster.

Important inventions in molecular biology are often framed as happening by serendipity.

A tiny microfluidic device lets you watch a single cell divide hundreds of times — and yet almost nobody uses it.

The Fast Biology Bounties went surprisingly well.

A single equation explains why Vibrio natriegens divides every 9.8 minutes — and points toward how to make cells grow faster.

When a prestigious journal scrapped accept-reject decisions on submitted papers, some scientists rebelled, and the editor-in-chief was fired.

TL;DR: $10,000 in prizes for ideas on how to speed up wet-lab experiments.

Good writers should not fear AI.

A microbe that divides every 10 minutes never displaced E. coli.

In the summer of 1946, shortly after the close of World War II, George Orwell published a short essay entitled “Why I Write.”

This essay originally appeared on the Asimov blog.

In 2011, while working in Brazil, Max Roser began formulating the idea for Our World in Data.

It’s generally a bad idea to write a book.

When people think of “biotech” — myself included — they tend to picture GLP-1s and gene therapies.

A few months ago, I saw some claims online that tardigrades—also called water bears—can survive for up to 30 years without food or water.

Many decades before the discovery of x-rays and the invention of powerful microscopes, Lord Rayleigh calculated the size of a single molecule.

OpenAI used GPT-5 to optimize Gibson Assembly.

I moved to the Bay Area to join Astera Institute as an independent fellow.

One reason David Goodsell’s paintings attract biologists, I think, is because they are unapologetically realistic.

There’s a new paper out in PNAS that hints at some intriguing synthetic biology applications.

The hydrogen atom revolutionized physics.

Many writers have published advice about how to write better, myself included.

A new paper in Nature shows that enzymes can be made by mixing just four molecules together, none of which are amino acids.

In the days before DNA sequencing, high-powered microscopes, and molecular biology textbooks, decoding the finer workings of a living cell often required arduou

Biochemistry textbooks often depict cells as spacious places, where molecules float in secluded harmony.

The first mouse emulation appeared in 2032; a rodent’s entire anatomy, and all of its cells—including the brain—perfectly recapitulated using computer hardware.

Arc Institute researchers recently published a preprint showing that their gene-editing technology, called Bridge recombinases, work in human cells.

A YouTube channel about LEGO machines got me thinking about fast iterations and biology.

Arithmetic is a superpower.

Emails are underrated.

Christian Anfinsen shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for showing that a protein's structure is encoded by its amino acid sequence — a breakthrough that predated the genetic code.

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The world needs more essays about biology.

Asimov Press, the publishing company that I run with Xander Balwit, has only been around for about a year.