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Do you like eating red lollies or drinking strawberry milk? If so, there’s a good chance you’ve been eating insects! But soon there might be a new way to make these treats red.

Inside most cells in your body, there’s a copy of your entire genetic code. It contains instructions that help build and maintain your body. If you imagine DNA in its double helix form, it’s a beautiful, perfect package. Except, maybe DNA doesn’t always look so perfect after all.

Written by Mike McRae An animal that smells of popcorn sounds more like a creature from a fairy tale than from reality. But the bearcat, found in Southeast Asia, is a real-life fantastic beast known for its unusual popcorn scent. The source of its smell, though, is hardly appetising.

Double Helix magazine is looking for your science questions! Our Microscope column answers the thorniest science queries you can throw at us. Email us at Helix.Editor@csiro.au or via our contact details below and you could have your question published. Here’s a sample question to get you thinking. Aisha Goshti asks: Why does the Sun makes […]

It’s really annoying to get bitten by a mosquito. Your skin often swells, and the bite can itch for days. But in many places in the world, that small bite isn’t just annoying. It can cause a life-threatening disease: malaria.

If you’ve ever flown overseas, you might have experienced jetlag. For example, daytime in London is night in Sydney, so your body can get very confused on a journey between the two. But jetlag isn’t just a human phenomenon, or even just an animal phenomenon. Turns out sunflowers can get jet lag too!

It takes a lot of information to make a human. It’s kept in our cells as DNA, which contains at least 20 000 genes. Some other forms of life can get by with much less DNA and fewer genes. Now one team of scientists think they’re close to making the simplest living thing possible.

In a recent blog post we reported on farts, a type of methane emission. When talking about these emissions, we made an omission. That is, we should have mentioned burps as well as farts.

Hidden within our cells, DNA is the hard drive of the human body. Each copy of DNA contains instructions for all the proteins needed to make a person. But this creative compendium is always under attack. This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three people who found out what’s repairing our genetic treasure.

Written by Beth Askham Bacteria living in soil could save our lives – if only we knew they existed. A new way of looking at soil bacteria is helping researchers discover new antibiotics.