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.
Bioinformatics bonanza: The curious case of shrunken 2600-year old brain
Neurologist Axel Petzold was listening to the radio, nursing a hangover from the previous night’s lab party, when he first ...
Can science explain love?
Love defies a neat definition because it is a mix of the objective and the subjective, of the biological and ...
‘Why are there still apes?’ Trump-endorsed Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker’s ignorant statements about human evolution
Donald Trump’s and Mitch McConnell’s candidate for the U.S. Senate from Georgia, football legend Herschel Walker, doesn’t have much of ...
From cloning to de-extinction: Scientists encounter limits on using CRISPR to resurrect animal species
With the advent of gene-editing technology such as CRISPR, scientists have shifted from cloning to genetic engineering as the most ...
Self perception: Most of us have a distorted sense of what we actually look like
Most of us are incredibly familiar with the sight of our own faces. But that doesn’t stop us from making ...
‘We’re in a race for solutions’: Why do these two Amazon tribes have such low dementia rates?
Two groups of indigenous people in the Bolivian Amazon have some of the world's lowest dementia rates, and that may ...
Post nuclear disaster: What species might dominate the world if humans went extinct?
Grim news showers us every day from the war in Ukraine, and given the real possibility of an extensive nuclear ...
Slowing Alzheimer’s with a drug? Scientists want to find out if that’s possible
Every two weeks, a nurse visits 43-year-old Marty Reiswig in Denver, Colorado, and injects him with an experimental drug called ...
How artificial intelligence and genome research are unlocking archaeological secrets of our distant past
DNA sequencing has opened the door to archaeogenetics, or biomolecular archaeology, the study of ancient DNA, recovered primarily from fossilized ...
How does memory form? See what a fearful recollection looks like in the brain of a zebrafish
In a new study published in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team at the ...
Facing onslaught of anti-trans legislation, transgender rights groups gird for multi-state battles
In August 2019, six weeks after Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen joined the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) as deputy executive director, ...
Virgin birth? Scientists induce parthoneogenesis in mice to study congenital diseases
The bible is no longer the only place where you’ll read testimonies about a virgin birth. In a new study ...
These 8 distinct traits are shared by famous psychopaths
What is psychopathy? For a concept that gets endless attention, there’s surprisingly little agreement. Various models have been put forward ...
How humans evolved to play music
One bone became particularly useful as a hearing device, the hyomandibular bone, a strut that, in fish, controls the gills ...
Sniffing out Parkinson’s early? Chinese scientists have developed disease-detecting e-nose
A study published in ACS Omega, by Chen Xing and Liu Jun at Zhejiang University, in China, describes an invention ...
Will there ever be a cure for addiction? Scientists weigh in
Up top we should note that there are many different kinds of addiction, and many different kinds of people, and ...
CRISPR critics say gene editing results in ‘unknowable mistakes’. Here’s how scientists are addressing that challenge
One of the grand challenges with using CRISPR-based gene editing on humans is that the molecular machinery sometimes makes changes ...
When it comes to improving sleep, resistance training may be better than aerobic workouts
Resistance training — weight machines, free weights, cables, etc. — may be better at generating quality sleep than aerobic exercise, ...
Menopause before 40? It could pose an added risk of dementia
Entering menopause before age 40 is linked to a 35% higher risk of developing dementia later in life, a preliminary ...
Infographic: Gene editing FAQ
Gene editing is when a scientist makes a tiny, controlled change in the DNA of a seed or animal, including ...
NFL ordered to dump ‘race-based’ formula for determining concussion damage, opening door for millions in settlements for retired Black players
The federal judge overseeing the N.F.L. concussion settlement formally removed the use of a race-based method to evaluate dementia tests ...
Psychedelics as therapeutics? Here is the rarely discussed downside
Psychedelics are generally safe drugs: The “classic” psychedelics, like psilocybin or LSD, have been shown to be low risk for ...
Anti-evolution state legislation has a notorious history – and it continues today
In a famous 1958 address commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s and Alfred Russel Wallace’s essays ...
More than 50 hard-to-detect genetic disorders can now be diagnosed with a revolutionary DNA test
A new DNA test, developed by researchers at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney and collaborators from Australia, ...
There’s a nationwide shortage of Black sperm donors. Here’s why
There has been a shortage of Black sperm donors and all donors of color for years, industry experts said. The ...
300,000 Americans contract Lyme disease each year. A gene editing solution could reduce that dramatically
Reducing tick-borne diseases, such as Lyme disease, may now be possible thanks to two new gene editing methods developed by ...
Nature vs nurture? ‘Culture is not a mere moderator of our biology, but a fully fledged cause’
Few scientists today would say that 100% of your attributes are inborn or are learned; the debate tends to be ...
