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Rosalind Franklin had seen the helix: A forgotten photograph rewrites the history of DNA’s structure

7 October 2026 at 15:45

For decades, one of the best-known stories in science was told like a movie. In 1953, at the age of 23, James Watson visited Maurice Wilkins’s laboratory at King’s College London. There, Wilkins showed him a photograph of DNA taken by Rosalind Franklin, and Watson had an epiphany. “The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,” Watson wrote in The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, the book in which he recounted, 15 years later, how he and Francis Crick unraveled the structure of DNA.

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© Photo 12 (Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Rosalind Franklin working at a microscope, alongside the image of DNA's structure.

Flávio Bolsonaro announces he wants to ‘reform the Constitution to redemocratize’ Brazil

7 October 2026 at 13:27

Right-wing candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, who hopes to win Brazil’s presidential election before the end of the month, announced Tuesday that he intends to leverage the large parliamentary bloc won by his party, the Liberal Party (PL), in Sunday’s vote to push through deep changes. The son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup against President Lula’s government, said at a campaign event in Goiânia, near Brasília, that he wants to use the PL’s legislative strength to appoint the presidents of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate and to “reform the Constitution, to redemocratize the country, so that institutions once again respect the Constitution.”

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© Adriano Machado (REUTERS)

Flávio Bolsonaro with former governor Ronaldo Caiado (left) and Governor Tarcísio de Freitas, Tuesday in Goiânia.

Lourdes M. Rosado, president of LatinoJustice: ‘These elections are the opportunity to tell Trump that his policies are not acceptable’

7 October 2026 at 12:48
Lourdes M. Rosado, attorney and president of LatinoJustice.

John Roberts, the discreet justice who has presided over the United States Supreme Court for two decades, was upset some time ago that people believed the nation’s highest court was making “political decisions.” In several polls, Americans said they were worried not only about how much power the court had amassed but also about all the rulings that have ended up bolstering Donald Trump and his control over the federal government.

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Nearly two decades on death row in Texas: The legal fight to save Melissa Lucio from lethal injection

7 October 2026 at 11:17
Melissa Lucio at the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville, Texas, on March 21, 2022.

When attorney Vanessa Potkin learned about the botched execution of inmate Christa Pike, she worried that her client, Melissa Lucio, would hear what had happened in Tennessee and think about what might happen to her. The Latina has spent nearly 18 years on death row in a Texas prison trying to prove she is innocent of causing her two-year-old daughter’s death.

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