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.
Discovering ‘ghost footprints’: Did humans come to North America tens of thousands of years earlier than we thought?
Recent discoveries of mammoth bones and “ghost” footprints left behind by ancient peoples are adding fuel to a scientific debate ...
Coming down with monkeypox comes with a stigma. Here’s how to talk about the virus
As places like San Francisco and New York state declare the monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency, there's a major ...
‘Racist overtones’: Renaming ’monkeypox’ runs into headwinds
Since the earliest days of the current global monkeypox outbreak, scientists and public health authorities have been calling for the ...
Strange symptoms: Hair and libido loss linked to long COVID
A huge new study has offered the most robust investigation to date into the symptoms and prevalence of long COVID ...
Back from the dead? Pig organs revived after cell life stopped, raising hopes for transplant breakthroughs
Researchers have restored circulation and cellular activity in the vital organs of pigs, such as the heart and brain, one ...
Haven’t had COVID yet? You’re part of an exclusive club — but that doesn’t mean you have ‘super immunity’
There are no winners in a pandemic. That said, if you’ve made it to the summer of 2022 without yet ...
Two more HIV patients beat the virus — helping scientists researching a permanent cure
A 66-year-old man in Southern California and a woman in her 70s in Spain are the latest in a small ...
New evidence refutes ‘lab-leak’ theory of COVID-19 origins
Scientists say there is "compelling evidence" that Wuhan's Huanan seafood and wildlife market was at the center of the Covid-19 ...
TPOXX controversy: Most effective treatment for monkeypox blocked by red tape. Here’s why
As monkeypox cases continue to rise in the U.S. and the rest of the world, many of those most affected ...
Do you sleep through the night? Your brain rhythmically oscillates between awake and asleep up to 100 times a night
Sleep is a complex neurological process characterized by shifting brain patterns, fluids flushing in and out of the skull, and ...
‘Smell cyborgs’ are replacing dogs that sniff out cancer or explosives
We live in a world of odors—chemical signals that contain valuable data about our health, the environment and even personal ...
Did the prevalence of gonorrhea in early humans lead to long-living and protective grandmothers?
The arms race between the human immune system and gonorrhea might have had the useful side effect of promoting healthy ...
Children aren’t exempt from long COVID risks
Post-COVID-19 conditions (PCCs), aligning with what's come to be known as long COVID, persisted at 3 months for many children ...
Talking to newborns: Within the first few hours, they can recognize language patterns and begin learning
Babies actually start processing language and speech incredibly early. Even while in the womb, they learn to discern voices, along ...
Cognitive shortcuts: How ‘magical thinking’ plays an important role in our lives
Adults often deny believing in magic, but on closer inspection, much of our behavior is more magical than we think ...
‘Mosaic nature of human evolution’: At what point did we become human?
The study of the genomes of our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, has opened up new research paths that ...
Long-awaited malaria vaccines finally reach children’s arms — but how effective are they?
As the World Health Organization announces the next step in its rollout of the world’s first authorized malaria vaccine in ...
The mind-bending effects of speaking multiple languages
It turns out that when a multilingual person wants to speak, the languages they know can be active at the ...
‘Picturing the mind’: These clever illustrations help us understand how consciousness evolved
What is consciousness, and who (or what) is conscious — humans, nonhumans, nonliving beings? Which varieties of consciousness do we ...
Age of anti-vaxxers: Polio rears its ugly head in the US after nearly a decade with no reported cases
After nearly a decade with no reported polio cases in the U.S., a resident of Rockland County, New York has ...
Ant colonies function like giant human brains
Ants combine sensory information about their environment with parameters of their colony to arrive at a group response. Most interestingly ...
What causes ‘growing pains’? Little is known about this childhood rite of passage
The term 'growing pains' has been used for hundreds of years to describe aching sensations many children experience in the ...
CRISPR vs mRNA: Excision and Moderna battle for genetic therapy for HIV
Moderna and Excision BioTherapeutics are stepping into a battle with HIV, a 41-year epidemic that has confuddled drug developers and ...
Betting on biotechnology: How to make beauty products more effective and sustainable
Beauty is better with biotechnology. Arcaea’s announcement that it acquired Gadusol Laboratories, an Oregon State University spinout, is the latest ...
One geneticist’s quest to crack autism’s code
Without knowing what causes autism, physicians had—and still have—no means of preventing it or reducing its severity, or risk of ...
‘Fast burst evolution’: Warm-blooded animals appear to have evolved very suddenly, enabling larger brains and higher levels of activity
A new study, published in Nature, suggests that ancestors of mammals known as mammaliamorphs abruptly went from being cold-blooded ectotherms ...
Viewpoint: COVID vaccine-doubting doctors call for impossibly large clinical trials. These logistical hurdles putt kids at risk
Since that severe COVID is mercifully rare in young children, it would take an expensive, time-consuming trial of hundreds of ...
