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.
Can biotechnology extend your life? A Russian-born billionaire is betting he can make it happen
[Yuri] Milner is a Russian-born billionaire who made a fortune on Facebook and Mail.ru and previously started the glitzy black-tie ...
Why are so many people resistant to daydreaming?
Thinking is a funny thing because research has shown that we’re the only species that can do it aimlessly. While ...
Why don’t humans have tails like other hominids? It could be an accident of evolutionary history
For half a billion years or so, our ancestors sprouted tails. As fish, they used their tails to swim through ...
How intermittent fasting can control weight and extend your life
Unlike many trendy diets, intermittent fasting appears to deliver real benefits—provided dieters can stick to the schedule, which usually restricts ...
Ultramarathoning: The joy (and pain) of pushing the edge of human limits
Ultramarathoners are interested in self-knowledge through physical exertion. Endurance running, from marathons up, is both a physical and a mental ...
I have a progressive genetic disease. Should I get a test to determine how severe it is?
[Charcot-Marie-Tooth, or] CMT disease runs in my family, and many of my relatives have chosen not to be officially diagnosed ...
More than half of US children have detectable levels of lead in their blood
More than half of children under 6 years old in the U.S. had detectable lead levels in their blood, with ...
Politics, ideology and values shape science at nearly every stage, from deciding what phenomena to research to how to talk about results
Science has always been political. The science policy scholar Daniel Sarewitz subsumes the idea that scientific research is politically neutral ...
Why exercising more doesn’t necessarily lead to weight loss
Scientific studies have shown overwhelmingly that a 25 percent reduction in daily calorie intake will significantly improve your health far ...
We have little relief for poison ivy rashes — but a vaccine is in the works
According to some older studies, poison ivy and its cousins poison oak and poison sumac cause 10 percent of lost-time ...
How the brain reorganizes and rewires after an injury
By the middle of the next decade, soldiers will be working with technology so closely that they will seem to ...
Polar bears are the largest surviving predator in North America. How do they measure up to what used to roam the continent?
North America's largest predatory mammal was probably the massive short-faced bear (Arctodus simus), said Ross MacPhee, senior curator of mammals ...
‘The existence of multiple universes sounds like science fiction, but observations within theoretical physics suggest it is possible, — and potentially inevitable’
One of the most compelling ideas in all of physics sounds like pure fiction, but it could actually describe our ...
Viewpoint: Battles over ‘virginity testing’ and ‘virginity-restoration surgery’ reveal the persistence of dangerous pseudoscience
Some girls are born without a hymen, while others tear the membrane long before they have sex, most commonly by ...
Life is a genetic lottery — but that’s a far cry from saying our traits are determined or fixed
People are often uncomfortable or anxious about genetics. "They think genetics means our outcomes are determined and that it doesn't ...
Mongrel humans: Evolution has forged genetically diverse and overlapping populations
“We are all mongrels – the idea of a pure population doesn’t exist,” says Professor Himla Soodyall. In the fragmented ...
Genetic advances could make sex unnecessary. Experts weigh on what that fantastical future might be like
"What would life be like without sex? In a nutshell, very impersonal and mechanical, to say the least. SOCIALLY, the ...
Will we be able to identify extraterrestrial life if it doesn’t resemble life on Earth?
When trying to imagine something we’ve never seen, we often default to something we have seen. For that reason, in ...
Women who have experienced sexual assault have a higher risk of dementia
Women who have been sexually assaulted have a higher risk of developing a type of brain damage that has been ...
Early humans traversed North America 10,000 years earlier than thought, in what is now New Mexico
For decades, many scientists were convinced that humans first arrived in the Americas as recently as 13,000 years ago, reaching ...
‘They squint, they stammer, they shuffle and shamble, they flounder like seals out of water’: Demonized for being different, left-handers are DNA puzzles
Being left-handed can be devilishly hard. In 1937, an educational psychologist whose work was later discredited wrote of many left-handers ...
Cloning is in high demand in the competitive world of camel beauty pageants
Cloning is in high demand in the competitive world of camel beauty pageants, leaving scientists at a Dubai clinic working ...
There are 7,000 spoken languages — and almost all share certain structural elements. Could that be driven by genetics?
There are around 7,000 human languages that we know of worldwide, and while they're all unique, they're also more similar ...
Moroccan cave offers window into 120,000 years of human clothing evolution
Scientists on [September 16] said artifacts unearthed in a cave in Morocco dating back as far as 120,000 years ago ...
Obesity and genetics: Researchers have found 14 genes that cause weight gain and three that help prevent it, opening door to new treatments
Obesity has become an epidemic, driven in large part by high-calorie diets laden with sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. Increasingly ...
‘Existence of testosterone-based effects should not be an excuse for tolerating aggression, violence, discrimination or other ills’: How the ‘male hormone’ shapes behavior
Testosterone’s wide-reaching effects occur not just in the human body, but across society, powering acts of aggression, violence, and the ...
3D scans of 5,000 points on the human face show links to genetic factors related to autism
In a new study, scientists are using high-tech 3D facial scans to understand the genetic causes of Autism better. Using ...
