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.
‘Competition between species has shaped our own evolutionary tree’: Human evolution works the ‘complete opposite’ way than most other animals
Interspecies competition in ancient humans saw an evolutionary trend that is the complete opposite of almost all other vertebrates, according to a ...
Orchid babies: Is this embryo scanning fertility startup furthering eugenics or ‘protecting future people from future suffering?’
God help the babies! Or, absent God, a fertility startup called Orchid. It offers prospective parents a fantastical choice: Have ...
Viewpoint: With weight loss drug prices plummeting, ‘it’s possible to imagine a future in which almost everyone is taking some variety of GLP-1 drug’
Last year was called the year of Ozempic, though it was also a year of Ozempic backlash and Ozempic shortages, which could persist for years ...
Is aging a ‘treatable disease’? Harvard geneticist faces accusations of ‘snake oil salesman’ as expert scientists refute claims
Harvard geneticist David Sinclair, who has said his “biological age” is roughly a decade younger than his actual one, has ...
AI and CRISPR converge: Artificial intelligence generates gene editing blueprints to solve host of previously untreatable diseases
Generative A.I. technologies can write poetry and computer programs or create images of teddy bears and videos of cartoon characters that look like something from a ...
Deep water living: Top-secret story of how British researchers experimented on themselves and found the key to surviving underwater — helping make D-Day a success
Geneticists John Burdon Sanderson Haldane and Helen Spurway’s goal was to see how long she could breathe the oxygen before ...
Companies race to achieve pig kidney transplants. Who will be first to convince the world their technologies are safest?
Xenotransplantation, the futuristic sounding field of animal-to-human organ transplants, is suddenly a lot closer to reality. The first two gene-edited ...
Were Neanderthals cannibals?
At this point, there’s little doubt Neanderthals ate each other, even if the practice doesn't appear to have been widespread ...
History of brainwashing: How the race for mind control changed America forever
A war correspondent who had spent considerable time in Asia, Edward Hunter had achieved brief media stardom in 1951 after ...
North Korea and bioweapons: US believes Communist dictatorship has engineered CRISPR biological weapons
North Korea has the capability to genetically engineer biological weapons, according to a U.S. government report. ... The report said ...
Podcast: Is ‘runner’s high’ real? Here’s the science
You’ve probably heard people talking about “runner’s high”: a sense of euphoria and relaxation runners feel when they’ve been running ...
DNA and politics: Is there a genetic basis for right-wing authoritarianism?
New research provides evidence that political leanings are more deeply intertwined with our genetic makeup than previously thought, specifically linked ...
‘We need to take more risks’: Global biodiversity crisis prompts researchers to explore editing species to save them from from climate change-induced extinction
Habitat degradation, invasive species, infectious diseases and climate change have put many native animals in jeopardy and given Australia one ...
Part 3: Human beings have transformed the Earth unlike any other species
Although human beings arrived on Earth just ~300,000 years ago, we’ve transformed the entire planet completely ...
China and social media disinformation: State-affiliated accounts leverage artificial intelligence to exploit racial tensions in the US, Taiwan and elsewhere
Online actors linked to the Chinese government are increasingly leveraging artificial intelligence to target voters in the U.S ...
Vaccine package warnings cover every side effect imaginable, no matter how rare — giving anti-vaxxers a tool to exploit
One of the cherished strategies of anti-vaxxers is to quote vaccine package inserts to “prove” that vaccines are dangerous ...
Part 2: Modern humans evolved just 300,000 years ago, the result of an intricate connection with every species on earth
The earliest primates gave rise to monkeys, great apes, hominids, and eventually, our own species itself: homo sapiens ...
A genetic mutation that prevents Alzheimer’s? Columbian villager who ‘outlived’ early-onset Alzheimer’s may provide insights to disease treatment
Researchers have made significant advances in understanding the genetic form of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease ...
‘Go for it’: Dozens of people on the brink of death put faith in controversial ‘in vivo’ CRISPR gene therapy treatments
Regulators last year approved the world’s first medicine using Crispr, the Nobel Prize-winning tool for modifying genes ...
Part 1: Mammals are newcomers on Earth. What was the world like when they thrived?
After life became complex and animals overran both land and sea, mammals didn’t arrive until relatively recently in natural history ...
Weight loss and fertility: Ozempic users report unexpected side effect — surprise pregnancies
Across social media, women who have used Ozempic or similar medications for diabetes or weight loss are reporting an unexpected ...
Viewpoint: AI is scrambling our view of civilization. Could humans be just middlemen in the evolution of intelligent beings?
Questions are now being asked about whether AI could present a danger to humanity, or if humanity is just a ...
What do you see when you imagine an apple or think of your best friend? Those with rare aphantasia can’t picture images in their heads
Most people can picture images in their heads - the look of an apple, the appearance of their kitchen or ...
Tucker Carlson’s ‘science’: UFOs are piloted by ‘spiritual entities’ hiding on Earth and Darwin’s theory of evolution is not true because ‘God created people distinctly’
Tucker Carlson has been mocked by experts after suggesting that Darwin's theory of evolution has been debunked ...
Saving human lives: Using gene therapy and fetal surgery to cure diseases in the womb
The convergence of these technologies into a whole new field of medicine dedicated to curing diseases before birth: fetal genome ...
What did sixth-century Chinese Emperor Wu look like? Genetic analysis creates 3D face reconstruction
A team of researchers has successfully generated a genome of the Chinese Emperor Wu (Wudi) of the Xianbei-led Northern Zhou ...
Video: BBC uncovers massive deception by Britain’s ‘social egg freezing’ clinics
Video: Women who freeze their eggs are being misled by some UK clinics about their chances of having a baby ...
