biology This is the world's first synthetic embryo complete with beating heart and brain beginning—no sperm or egg required David Pescovitz
animals For the first time ever, scientists finally crack the code for editing marsupial genes Thom Dunn
Delightful Creatures Build a Crowbox kit and become friends with your neighborhood crows Mark Frauenfelder
happy mutants Shade the Changing Girl v. 1: On sidequels and writing the teenage alien. Cecil Castellucci
infosec Someone at the Chaos Communications Congress inserted a poem into at least 30 million servers' logfiles Cory Doctorow
Dogs are suffering in Georgia Regents University dental experiments, says US Humane Society Xeni Jardin