Daily Human Digest
Every day, the staff of the Genetic Literacy Project scours the Web for stories on a range of human genetics issues, including gene editing, regulations and bioethics, gene therapy, epigenetics, personal genomics, evolution, ancestry and artificial intelligence. We publish excerpts of those stories and encourage our readers to visit the original publications for the complete stories.
Statistics’ dark past? History of eugenics still haunts American universities
[University College London] was an epicenter of the early 20th-century eugenics movement—a precursor to Nazi “racial hygiene” programs—due to its ...
Is your temperature lower than 98.6? Here’s why you shouldn’t be worried
Feeling under the weather? Chances are you or your doctor will grab a thermometer, take your temperature and hope for ...
In a politically divided America, here’s how the biotechnology sector sees its future
[W]hat does Joe Biden’s presidency mean for biopharma? Part of that question will rest on whether Democrats can pull of ...
FDA mulling approval of a device that monitors brains using electrodes threaded through veins and plugged into a computer
For decades, technologists have been trying to get brains to interface with computer keyboards or robot arms, to get meat ...
Large autism mutation risk does not increase as parents age, study finds
Spontaneous, or de novo, mutations can occur in a sperm or egg cell, or very early on in an embryo’s ...
Black biologist Charles Henry Turner’s groundbreaking research on animal cognition remains largely unacknowledged
A new Perspectives essay published in Science describes the contributions of biologist Charles H. Turner (1867-1923), an American zoologist whose “early discoveries ...
Almost 50 years after brutal rape and murder, DNA cracks cold case, suspect commits suicide before conviction
For 47 years, the case remained cold, with little evidence of who assaulted and murdered [20-year-old Jody] Loomis — until ...
AI might be able to diagnose whether you have COVID-19 by just monitoring your cough
The difference between a healthy person’s cough and the cough of someone infected with [SARS-CoV-2] is so slight that it’s ...
Scientists reconstructed fox-sized dinosaur ‘pea brain’
According to [a] new study, Buriolestes schultzi’s brain had an elongated shape and weighed about 1.5 grams, as much as a ...
200 million people contract malaria each year. A genetically engineered vaccine might soon be coming
Malaria’s catastrophic toll has inspired many attempts to create a viable vaccine, but the genetic complexity of the malaria parasite ...
Women and HIV: 6 shots a year shown to be more effective than daily pill
Women have had only one approved option for pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, a course of drugs taken to prevent contracting ...
How synthetic biology can eliminate pollutants in wastewater and soil
Allonnia launched with $40 million in funding to engineer and commercialize microbes to eliminate pollutants in wastewater and soil. "The waste ...
HIV infections among gay and bisexual men hit 20 year low
A PHE report reveals that overall, across all genders and sexualities, the number of people with a new HIV diagnosis dropped ...
Males=hunters, females=gatherers? Not so fast. Many early big-game hunters were women, research suggests
In 2018, during archaeological excavations at a high-altitude site called Wilamaya Patjxa in what is now Peru, researchers found an ...
If your disposition is cheerful, you’re less likely to experience memory decline
A new study published in the journal Psychological Science found that people who feel enthusiastic and cheerful -- what psychologists call "positive ...
Human brains prewired to understand words
Analyzing brain scans of newborns, researchers found that this part of the brain – called the "visual word form area" ...
Dreaming while awake is possible and other strange facts about dreams
[W]e’ve examined five strange findings about dreaming from the psychology literature: … 3. People who no longer think can still ...
Scourge of pay-for-play predatory journals: American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research publishes Pokémon satire on COVID with Bruce Wayne quote from Gotham Forensics Quarterly
[My] paper, “Cyllage City COVID-19 outbreak linked to Zubat consumption,” blames a fictional creature for an outbreak in a fictional ...
Do AI robots have a ‘right to life’?
In the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode “The Measure of a Man,” Data, an android crew member of the Enterprise, is to ...
With 75 million people projected to be living with dementia in 19 years, science turns to AI for early diagnoses
[A] study, funded by the [National Institute on Aging] and published this year in the Journal of the American Geriatrics ...
Difficulty falling asleep? The problem might be in your genes
People with [delayed sleep phase disorder] are unable to fall asleep until late at night (often after 2 a.m.) and ...
Recreational fear: Why some of us like scary movies and haunted houses
[We] tend to seek out scary movies, horror novels, or haunted houses—and not just during the Halloween season. This tendency ...
Biologist Emily Willingham explores humans’ obsession with animal penises in “Phallacy”
The organ appears in religious texts, laws, daily speech and even in photos sent, often uninvited, to people’s phones. But ...
Dogs and humans migrated together across the ancient world, DNA evidence shows
Dogs are one of the biggest enigmas of domestication. Despite decades of study, scientists still haven’t figured out when or where ...
CRISPR gene editing to correct harmful mutations could in rare cases wreak havoc on our chromosomes, study claims
[L]arge-scale damage was found in a study that analyzed human embryos that had been edited with CRISPR-Cas9. The study, from ...
Brain implants on the cusp of reality help patients immobilized by ALS, strokes or spinal cord injuries
[B]rain activity is collected by sensors implanted in a blood vessel in [Phil] O’Keefe’s brain and relayed to a computer ...
Extinct Denisovans – modern human cousins – may have contributed genes to high-altitude adaptations seen in Tibetans
[A] cave on the Tibetan Plateau was once home to Denisovans, an ancient species of humans whose remains had previously ...
A question of accountability: How can we prevent the release of potentially harmful human-created organisms?
When it comes to risk from synthetic biology applications, one source of concern is the community of DIY biologists and ...
