Health & Medicine
Through the study and use of genetics, we can identify measures that could lead to the improvement of human health and wellness. These methods and procedures aim to prevent years of chronic disease and thousands of dollars in health care costs, and provide families and communities with knowledge of how to live healthier.
Below is the complete archive of related articles sorted by date.
Human eggs from blood cells? New technique could ‘transform reproduction’
Scientists in Japan made progress recently in the quest to combat infertility, creating the precursor to a human egg cell in a ...
Genetic Noah’s Ark intends to sequence DNA of 66,000 species
An international consortium involving over 50 institutions has announced an ambitious project to assemble high-quality genome sequences of all 66,000 ...
‘Fight or flight’: Body’s natural stress response linked to depression, diabetes and heart disease
[Our] so-called “fight-or-flight” response served our ancestors well, but its continual activation in our modern-day lives comes with a cost ...
‘Gluten free,’ ‘organic’ and other health fads driving ‘huge’ changes in food production
U.S. consumers are increasingly scanning labels to check that products do not contain certain ingredients, such as gluten, GMOs, antibiotics, pesticides ...
Sexual reproduction may not be the best evolutionary strategy. So why do we do it?
In many ways asexual reproduction is a better evolutionary strategy: only one parent is needed, and all of their genes ...
Proxima Centauri b: Why Earth’s cosmic neighbor could be suitable for life
Ever since the discovery of the exoplanet—known as Proxima Centauri b—in 2016, people have wondered whether it could be capable of ...
Viewpoint: UC-San Francisco is the ‘academic home of the anti-GMO movement’
Being anti-GMO is the biotech equivalent of being anti-vaccine. The scientific literature overwhelmingly and definitively has concluded that GMOs are safe ...
Biotech crops could soften impact of climate change, Gates Foundation says
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) just released its 2018 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the ...
Bayer asks judge to toss ‘flimsy’ $289 million glyphosate-cancer verdict
Bayer on [September 18th] said it wants a California state court judge to overturn the jury’s verdict, order a new ...
Viewpoint: There’s no such thing as an organic ‘superfood’
If you do a Google search of "Oz superfoods" you will get more than 40,000 hits. The good doctor really likes superfoods ...
New opioid promises ‘gold standard’ pain relief without the addiction
Opioid drugs like morphine and Oxycontin are still held as the gold standard when it comes to relieving pain. But ...
‘Voluntary euthanasia’: Are we ready to harvest organs while donors are still alive?
In the dystopian society of Nobel prizewinner Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, cloned people are raised to provide organs for ...
Can a blood test find your body’s internal clock
Your body has a clock—and thanks to the travails of modern life, that clock may not line up with the timing ...
Viewpoint: Coffee cancer warning illustrates failure of California’s Prop 65 law
On August 29, the FDA threw its hat into California’s eternal does-or-doesn’t-coffee-cause-cancer fight. “Requiring a cancer warning on coffee, based ...
Why probiotics may or may not help you—and could even harm you
From pickles and candy bars to pills and protein powders, probiotics are touted as a health boon in all flavors ...
Confusion over the origins of smallpox vaccine could leave us ‘vulnerable to a future outbreak’
Not only is there the potential for smallpox (or at the very least, something very similar) to resurge, but unbeknownst ...
Why the promise of personalized medicine could fall short for minorities
African-Americans are underrepresented in large-scale genetic and neuroscience studies ...
Poppy genome reveals ‘bizarre’ biological errors that gave us ‘intoxicating medicines’
A series of bizarre events and biological errors over evolutionary history were responsible for the intoxicating medicines found inside the ...
Why those sleepless nights could increase your Alzheimer’s risk
New research suggests bad sleep causes a build-up of plaque associated with Alzheimer’s ...
Golden eagle genome gives conservation effort a ‘blueprint for life’
British scientists have made a breakthrough that could help safeguard the future of one of the world's most admired birds ...
Roundup in breast milk? Disturbing new details in the plot to discredit nutritionist Shelley McGuire
In July 2015, Michelle (Shelley) McGuire, a nutrition professor and lactation expert then at Washington State University (WSU), was targeted ...
Can artificial intelligence give us a more efficient health care system?
To understand the benefits that artificial intelligence can bring to the world of human medicine, consider the case of Ayako ...
New studies questioning safety of GMO corn ‘contain serious flaws,’ experts say
Two -omics studies on genetically modified maize and Roundup-fed rats, recently published in the journal Scientific Reports, contain serious flaws ...
DNA test could help people with severe food allergies avoid peanuts
For people with severe peanut allergies, eating even minuscule amounts of the legume can trigger anaphylaxis -- a life-threatening condition ...
Could artificial intelligence protect the world from humanity’s ‘shortsightedness’?
There are fears that tend to come up when people talk about futuristic artificial intelligence — say, one that could ...
80 percent of Americans prefer organic produce, but are they healthier for it?
A whopping 82.3 percent of American households stock up on organic food .... But what if everything we know—or think we know—about ...
Large drug trials are expensive and results often misleading. A new genetic tool might cure those problems.
[C]orrelation is not causation. The fact that two phenomena or trends are correlated in time does not mean one causes ...
