AI researcher Blaise Agüera y Arcas argues that life and computation share fundamental logic in an essay adapted from his book What Is Intelligence? (2025). “It’s not a metaphor to call DNA a ‘program’—that is literally the case,” he writes, tracing ideas from Alan Turing’s morphogenesis and John von Neumann’s self-reproducing automaton through modern neural networks. Agüera positions the human body as a massively parallel computer—300 quintillion ribosomes computing simultaneously.

“I’ll be the first to admit this approach seems a little strange,” writes Mark Temple, describing his sonification of DNA sequences into musical compositions. Mapping genetic code to harmonic intervals, the molecular biologist creates tracks that evolve through programmed mutations and using specific DNA markers to structure musical sections. Temple has released a web tool for public DNA sonification and will perform his genetic compositions during Australia’s National Science Week.

“My experiments seem to force the behaviour and structure, rather than letting them emerge naturally from uniform rules,” writes creative coder Etienne Jacob. In a breakdown of Physarum polycephalum-inspired algorithms for organic simulations, Jacob reveals how slime mold foraging patterns can be computationally recreated through particle systems that deposit trails and follow chemical gradients. His open-source GPU implementations elegantly blur biology and computation.

“She examined a belt as she twisted it left and right,” Yasemin Saplakoglu writes of American biophysicist Jane S. Richardson’s late 1970s breakthrough in representing protein structures. For Quanta, Saplakoglu explains how Richardson first drew “the folds of a protein’s amino acid backbone without getting bogged down in the details of specific atomic arrangements” for a journal article (1981, image). The (M.C. Escher-inspired) ribbon diagram technique is now ubiquitous in structural biology.