Carl Zimmer
Does same-sex bonding in animals provide insight into sexual orientation in humans?
Apes branched off from other primates about 25 million years ago and evolved a much higher rate of same-sex sexual ...
COVID research transparency: Lab loopholes can lead to unnecessarily risky experiments. What can be done?
Scientists at Boston University came under fire this week for an experiment in which they tinkered with the Covid virus ...
10 years old: CRISPR is revolutionizing medicine and agriculture, raising profound ethical questions
Ten years ago this week, Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues published the results of a test-tube experiment on bacterial genes ...
Omicron is dominating Delta, but future variants will most likely overtake them both
“Omicron is likely to push Delta out,” said Alex Sigal, a virologist at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban, ...
What can we expect from two about-to-be-introduced COVID treatment pills?
The Food and Drug Administration is expected to soon authorize a pill made by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, called molnupiravir, ...
Why don’t humans have tails like other hominids? It could be an accident of evolutionary history
For half a billion years or so, our ancestors sprouted tails. As fish, they used their tails to swim through ...
NDV-HXP-S ‘game changer’: A new low-cost vaccine made in chicken eggs now in clinical trials could change the way we fight COVID
[A new] vaccine, called NDV-HXP-S, is the first in clinical trials to use a new molecular design that is widely ...
COVID variant warning: Brazil P.1 variant infects many who had recovered, devastating Manaus
B.1.1.7, first identified in Britain, has demonstrated the power to spread far and fast. In South Africa, a mutant called ...
UK COVID variant now spreading across the US likely deadlier than original virus
[British scientists recently said] that there was a “realistic possibility” that the variant was not only more contagious than others, ...
Evolution and the pandemic: How COVID could develop resistance to vaccines over time
With the emergence of what seem so far to be safe and effective vaccine candidates, it appears that humanity may be ...
COVID-19 vaccine tracker: What’s the status of all vaccines in development?
Vaccines typically require years of research and testing before reaching the clinic, but in 2020, scientists embarked on a race ...
‘Editing Humanity’: Kevin Davies’ new book on CRISPR, the ‘miracle of our age’
“The Crispr story has arrived for the grand telling as a miracle of our age,” the [MIT Technology Review announced ...
COVID vaccines for children need to be vetted more carefully and may not be ready for a full year
Thanks to the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed and other programs, a number of Covid-19 vaccines for adults are already in advanced ...
What if the first COVID vaccines are rushed, not guaranteed to be safe, and limited in effectiveness?
[A] surprising number of research groups are placing bets on some [COVID-19 vaccines] that have not yet been given to ...
Who are COVID-19 ‘super spreaders’ and how do they transmit the virus so widely
Growing evidence shows most infected people aren’t spreading the virus. But whether you become a superspreader probably depends more on ...
Intriguing links between blood types and COVID-19 outcomes
Why do some people infected with the coronavirus suffer only mild symptoms, while others become deathly ill? Geneticists have been ...
New York’s coronavirus outbreak traced to travelers who arrived from Europe in February before travel ban was imposed
New research indicates that the coronavirus began to circulate in the New York area by mid-February, weeks before the first ...
What is it about the coronavirus genome that makes it so dangerous?
In January, scientists deciphered a piece of very bad news: the genome of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. The ...
Bizarre deep sea microbe could help explain origins of ‘animals, plants, fungi and humans’
Two billion years ago, simple cells gave rise to far more complex cells. Biologists have struggled for decades to learn ...
Scientists reconstruct yet-to-be-found skull of humans’ last common ancestor entirely through computer imaging
[R]esearchers like Dr. [Aurélien] Mounier are using computers and mathematical techniques to reconstruct the appearance of fossils they have yet ...
Podcast: Why did we survive, when the Denisovans and Neanderthals did not?
The Denisovans have long been one of the most elusive ancient human cousins, until now. In May 2019, scientists revealed ...
7 things we get wrong about heredity
Many people have misconceptions about heredity—how we are connected to our ancestors and how our inheritance from them shapes us ...
Crime scene investigators couldn’t tell identical twins’ DNA apart. Until now
One night in November 1999, a 26-year-old woman was raped in a parking lot in Grand Rapids, Mich. Police officers ...
Genetically modified humans? Here’s why they already exist
It felt as if humanity had crossed an important line: In China, a scientist named He Jiankui announced on Monday ...
‘Living medicine’: Reengineering bacteria to tackle genetic diseases
In a study carried out over the summer, a group of volunteers drank a white, peppermint-ish concoction laced with billions ...
Can you inherit a laugh? Book explores this and other genetics questions
Why are people today often taller than their ancestors? If you have blue eyes or red hair, does that mean your children will ...
Viewpoint: Genetic intelligence tests are ‘worse than just wrong’
On a recent visit to [genetic data website] DNA.Land, I scanned down the list of traits they offered to tell ...
Why can your DNA vary from cell to cell? Mosaicism is a ‘hidden mix of mutations’
James Priest couldn’t make sense of it. He was examining the DNA of a desperately ill baby, searching for a ...