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.
Who shares fake news? This personality type is most likely fall for misinformation
To find solutions to this misinformation crisis, our society needs a clear-eyed assessment of who and what drives the spread ...
It’s alive! 3-D printers can produce biological blobs for medical and industrial uses
In a new study, scientists have outlined a new type of 'living ink' or bioink made from programmed Escherichia coli ...
The science of bad breath
Though everyone has likely experienced some bad breath at one point or another, Colgate reports that one in four people ...
Many people experience visions and strange dreams before they die
Old age. Cancer. A rare disease of the nervous system. Whatever the reason, the fact remains: A life is about ...
Humans drive evolution of other organisms, from condors to the coronavirus
Many people think that evolution is some magical phenomenon that takes hundreds, even thousands of years to occur. People think ...
How does smoking marijuana affect your health? Here’s the latest evidence
Pot use has soared among Americans over the age of 26 — over 10 percent of them reported getting high ...
‘Venice of the stone age’: Why this ancient Chinese city was abandoned
Some 4,000 years ago, a sophisticated society that built a city of canals known as “China’s Venice of the Stone ...
‘Category X’: What’s the science behind asexuality?
“Asexuality is an identity on equal footing with heterosexuality, homosexuality and so on", says Sunniva Árja Tobiasen. She is one ...
Suicidal tendencies linked to specific genes, correlated with other psychiatric risk factors such as smoking and sleep disturbances
In the largest genetic study of suicide attempts to date, researchers have identified a region of the genome on chromosome ...
Mystery of 3.7 million year old footsteps solved
In the 1970s, a set of 3.66-million-year-old human footprints preserved in volcanic ash turned the paleontology field upside down. They ...
‘Even one vaping session can cause detectable adverse effects on the body’
Young, healthy adults who try vaping for the first time may experience an immediate reaction that can harm cells and ...
Visual sleuthing: ‘An ecosystem of misinformation about the meaning of nonverbal behavior’
Over the course of the past few years, the idea that a twitch or an itch reveals a person’s innermost ...
Can blood work provide a road map for beauty treatments and lifestyle choices?
Blood work is a standard component of annual physicals, but what if it were also commonly done at facialist appointments? ...
Programming biology: How gene synthesis will lead to a host of medical and drug innovations
As a customer, you can visit the Twist website, upload a spreadsheet with the DNA sequence that you want, select ...
If we gene hacked humanity to be more like our bonobo cousins, would militarism become obsolete (and sex more frequent)?
Bonobos are a species of primate believed to be humankind’s second-closest living ancestor. That’s intriguing, because zoologists have long observed ...
Sleep and screen time: Digital tools auto-transmit helpful data from your smartphone to your therapist
A therapist and patient can tell each other a lot in an hour. But imagine if the patient and therapist ...
Evidence emerges that this early human species swung from trees but also walked upright
Early hominins used their upper limbs to climb like apes and their lower limbs to walk like humans, according to ...
Life span vs. health span: How physical activity wards off age-related disease
In a new review published [November 22] in PNAS, [evolutionary biologist Daniel] Lieberman and his Harvard co-authors grapple with the ...
Couples undergoing IVF can get genetic testing to prevent birth defects
Many families carry some defective genes that can give rise to known genetic disorders. Some of these are incompatible with ...
Viagra could cut risk of Alzheimer’s disease by as much as 70%
Usage of the medication sildenafil – better known to most as the brand-name drug Viagra – is associated with dramatically ...
‘Many sites were hidden in plain sight’: How digital tools are revolutionizing archeology
Hidden parts of deep human history are being revealed by digital tools that generate new troves of data for archaeologists ...
Scentless chemical in human body odor triggers protective mechanism in men and aggression in women
Sniffing a chemical in human body odor – commonly known as BO – triggers aggression in women but blocks aggression ...
The darker side of IVF and fertility treatments
According to a 2018 study, 33 percent of Americans have used IVF or another form of assisted reproductive technology (ART) to get pregnant, ...
Are humans doomed to go extinct?
Mammal species tend to come and go rather rapidly, appearing, flourishing and disappearing in a million years or so. The ...
Microbes as sustainable fuel: A better way to make chemicals currently derived from oil and gas
A team of chemists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota has now engineered microbes to ...
DNA from ancient Etruscan bones and teeth spurs rewrite of 25-century old Italian civilization’s history
For years, the origins of the Etruscans remained an unsolved mystery. They inhabited central Italy for two thousand years before ...
As plain as the nose on your face: Sniffing out what we know about the evolutionary history of the proboscis
Mammalian noses, including the prominent snout that graces the head of the horse, are an evolutionary novelty – and also ...
