In his Essay about the Phaistos Disc ('A century of puzzling' Nature 453, 990–991; 2008), Andrew Robinson notes that the largest known alphabet is Russian, with 36 letters. In fact, the Russian ...

The DNA of life on Earth naturally stores its information in just four key chemicals — guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine, commonly referred to as G, C, A and T, respectively. Now scientists have ...