All articles from Works in Progress

The art of protein design with AI

Watch now | Scientists are using AI to hallucinate entirely novel proteins that could transform medicine, agriculture, and materials science

What makes Joel Mokyr great

His Nobel is a triumph for history and the importance of ideas

Chinese dams hold billions of people to ransom

Could desalination make them irrelevant?

What's new in biology: October 2025

Safer transplants, new antibiotics, the rise of paper mills, long-term flu protection, slowing down ageing, and more.

Hacking proteins with AI

AlphaFold, ProteinMPNN and other tools are transforming drug design, but how do they work, and can we use them to create a strep A vaccine for the very first time?