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.
Before Neanderthals: Untangling the vast web of pre-modern human ancestors
When paleontologists and anthropologists look back at the history of hominin evolution, they find a veritable Gordian Knot, one that ...
Inside the mind of a serial killer
Serial killers characteristically lack empathy for others, coupled with an apparent absence of guilt about their actions. At the same ...
What does it mean for AI to ‘understand’? What are the limits of artificial intelligence?
How can we determine in practice whether a machine can understand? In 1950, the computing pioneer Alan Turing tried to ...
‘You act like a Neanderthal’? Consensus view changes — Homo Sapiens no smarter than our extinct cousins
We’ve long thought that humans must have survived because we were intelligent enough to outsmart our own extinction; meanwhile the ...
The 62-mile-high club: As space tourism launches, NASA urged to explore ‘space sexology’
According to NASA, no humans have ever had sex in space, but with the swift ascent of private space tourism, ...
How a fascination with telepathy pseudoscience laid the groundwork for modern brain research
A brush with death led Hans Berger to invent a machine that could eavesdrop on the brain. In 1893, when ...
Cancerland? A wider array of cancer pre-screening and hyper-early detection methods are arriving. Here’s why that’s problematic
Cancer is appropriately perceived as a disease of risk: genetic or heritable risks, lifestyle risks and the unknown risks of ...
Just like in humans, allowing artificial intelligence (AI) programs to ‘sleep’ in between tasks reduces mistakes
What our brains do when our eyes are closed and our visual cortex isn’t processing the outside world may be ...
The twilight zone of sleep: That’s a sweet spot for human creativity
People who recently drifted off into a light sleep later had problem-solving power, scientists report December 8 in Science Advances ...
Viewpoint: What is ‘scientism’ — and why does that worldview fail us?
Over the last 15 years of being a scientist who writes about science in a variety of forums, I have ...
Bioeconomy: How synthetic biology can tackle manufacturing and disease challenges
The bioeconomy covers all sectors and systems that rely on biological resources (animals, plants, microorganisms, and derived biomass, including organic ...
What is a human being? The evolution of ‘personhood’
It is at the intersection between psychology and the social sciences (as well as humanities and philosophy) that we find ...
CRISPR gene-editing techniques could prevent illness by reprogramming gut bacteria
To date, CRISPR enzymes have been used to edit the genomes of one type of cell at a time: They ...
Synthetic biology innovations that rewire human cells poised to tackle complex diseases
Let’s recognize that synthetic biology can make the impossible happen in many areas besides food production. For example, synthetic biology ...
Why geneticists are moving away from using the term ‘race’ — but not its meaning
Geneticists are moving away from using the term "race" in their papers, but the meaning of replacement descriptors such as ...
Hominids have existed on earth for two million years. What makes us human?
The distinction between ourselves and other animals is, arguably, artificial. Animals are more like humans than we might think – ...
Xenobots: Are organic robots programmed to find cancer cells the future of regenerative medicine?
Scientists say they've witnessed a never-before-seen type of replication in organic robots created in the lab using frog cells. Among ...
How artificial intelligence (AI) alters human behavior
For decades, humans have been building and modifying machine learning models to perform a variety of tasks. But while we’ve ...
Do hormonal factors protect women against cardiovascular disease?
Several lines of evidence support the idea that cardiovascular disease is linked to variations in female hormones. First, women develop ...
How did intelligent problem-solving behavior come to exist?
How can a biological system ever generate coherent and goal-oriented behavior from the bottom up when there is no external ...
Video: A-maze-ing — How a robot used ‘smart polymers’ to teach itself to navigate labyrinths
Machine learning and neural networks have become all the rage in recent years, and quite understandably so, considering their many ...
Yet another patient was naturally cured of HIV
Researchers have identified a second HIV-positive person whose body might have naturally cleared the infection — sparking hope that studying ...
Podcast: Why do people donate kidneys to strangers? Is altruism an evolved human trait?
Penny Lane gave up months of wages and weeks of her life to have her kidney cut out and given ...
CRISPR gene therapy shows great promise — but evidence suggests caution about unintended consequences is warranted
CRISPR-Cas9 works by creating double-stranded DNA breaks at specific points in a DNA sequence, allowing scientists to target and edit ...
Genetic screening can reveal your likelihood of suffering from a deadly disease — but that doesn’t mean you can’t change the odds
Ruby had inherited a faulty gene from her father, the one that had caused his death aged 36 from a ...
Higher resting heart rate linked to increased risk of dementia
Higher resting heart rate (RHR) was linked to greater dementia risk and faster cognitive decline independent of cardiovascular disease in ...
3 years ago, CRISPR was used to alter the genes of two babies in China. How are they faring now?
Three years after the ‘CRISPR babies’ burst into the public eye and caused outrage, their fate remains shrouded in secrecy ...
