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.
Horses originated in North America but went extinct there. New DNA trail shows how they survived and thrived in Europe
The first ancient horses lived in forests 55 million years ago, both in Europe and America. At that time they ...
‘Clinically proven’ memory-boosting supplements like Prevagen don’t work. So how do they escape FDA crackdown?
Some popular supplements advertised on TV claim to be “clinically” proven, but in fact are not. Notably, the maker of ...
Deadly viruses that target chickens can spill over into humans. Gene editing is a solution — if activists don’t block rollout
Diseases such as avian flu trigger the culling of millions of birds each year. But that need not be the ...
‘The notion of humankind’s African origins unifies researchers’: Human evolution is like a braided stream, fossil and DNA evidence suggests
In a field with a reputation for bitter feuds and rivalries, the notion of humankind’s African origins unifies human evolution ...
Lifebrain project: Education has almost no effect on brain health and does not protect against dementia
If you find it difficult to remember things as you get older, it’s partly because your brain is shrinking gradually, ...
Genetic factors can identify which people with bipolar disorder and PTSD are at the greatest risk of suicide
People who suffer from bipolar disorder and are genetically predisposed to post traumatic stress disorder may have a higher risk ...
How cyber criminals exploit our ‘lizard brains’ to steal our personal information
Nearly 800,000 people fell victim to cyberscams in 2020, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Internet Crime Complaint Center ...
In early organoid studies, CRISPR gene editing shows promise for curing cystic fibrosis
For the first time, a type of CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing, called prime editing, has been performed in “mini-organs” to correct the ...
‘Sweeping genetic differences under the rug does not make inequality go away’: Genes found to significantly influence educational achievements
Kathryn Paige Harden argues how far we go in formal education – and the huge knock-on effects that has on ...
How do animals react when danger and death threaten?
Our concept of death is one of those characteristics, like culture, rationality, language or morality, that have traditionally been taken ...
5 ways synthetic biology can protect vulnerable animal and plant species
Here are five ways in which synthetic biology is having a significant impact and reducing the use of animals and ...
‘It has never been a given that humans would survive on Earth’: Reflections on the nonlinear tangled web of human evolution
It has never been a given that humans would survive on Earth. We have likely faced extinction several times in ...
India and other developing countries struggling to develop regulations that match the fast-paced science of gene editing
Called CRISPR, or “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”, the technology is a powerful tool for editing genomes. It allows ...
Why is the human brain so different from the brains of closely-related species?
More than 3,000 regions in the human genome are very different in people from in any other mammals, including our ...
99% of all animals that have ever lived on Earth started their development in eggs. Here is how evolution has worked its magic
More than 99 per cent of all animals that have ever lived on planet Earth have, in the first moments ...
‘Bold, aggressive, athletic and sociable’: Here are the many ways squirrels have human-like personality traits
Animal researchers in California have discovered human-like personality traits in squirrels that anybody watching one raiding nuts from a bird ...
East African research finds key facial features are common across diverse populations
A new study published in PLOS Genetics compares genomic factors underlying facial features in East Africans and Europeans to reveal ...
A brief history of the revolutionary impact of psychedelic therapy
In the last 10 years, psychedelic drugs like LSD, magic mushrooms, DMT, a host of "plant medicines" – including ayahuasca, ...
Infographic: Autoimmune diseases — 76 identified so far — tend to target women over men. Here is a master list
There are many autoimmune diseases, and taken together they affect as much as 4.5 percent of the world’s population. This ...
‘Fatally, tragically flawed’: Why research and recommendations addressing the obesity epidemic are so wrong
For nearly a century, obesity research has been predicated on the belief that the cause of the disorder “is an ...
How and when did ‘consciousness’ evolve?
[To find a reliable marker for consciousness,] we looked at genes, proteins, anatomical brain regions and neurophysiological processes, but none ...
Viewpoint: 5 arguments for God’s existence from NY Times columnist Ross Douthat — and 5 reasons why he’s wrong
[In a New York Times essay, columnist and Catholic Ross] Douthat not only advances some of the common and unconvincing ...
How dogs ‘read’ humans’ emotional states and use them to guide their decisions
New research has shed light on how an understanding of human emotions by man's best friend can help them predict ...
Viewpoint: Science denialism is not the exclusive province of the political right — it’s growing on the left, too
There is, I think, a fairly well-established idea that the Left is the “side” of science and evidence, and the ...
Dimwitted Neanderthals? Pioneering research challenges ‘outdated’ assumptions about our ancestors
For a long time, paleoanthropologists viewed Neanderthals as being very distinct from our own species, and inherently incapable of sharing ...
Video: The story of ‘Miracle Millie’, the chihuahua cloned 49 times — and how to (expensively) extend the life of your pet
What if you never had to say goodbye to your best four-legged friend? That's right, now you can clone your ...
CRISPR gene editing to cure HIV? It’s now in clinical trials
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given the nod for Excision BioTherapeutics to begin trials testing CRISPR gene ...
