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.
Sleepy during the day? Struggle with sleep apnea? Both are genetically linked to telomeres, parts of your chromosomes that reflect biological age
A predilection for afternoon naps does not necessarily mean you need to worry about your own mortality, but the scientific ...
Did Homo sapiens really outcompete Neanderthals? Genetics is rewriting the story of human evolution
Homo sapiens evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago, and between 177,000 and 194,000 years ago they colonized what is ...
DNA test for couples? Start-up Orchid claims its over-the-counter kit can identify complex inherited disorders. Is it ready for prime time?
A new startup called Orchid is offering the chance for couples planning a pregnancy to learn their odds of passing ...
Microplastics are overwhelming the environment. Here’s how we could mobilize bacteria to clean up our pollution mess
Microplastics are not easily biodegradable, so they stick around for long periods of time and they also absorb and accumulate ...
Brains make the difference: Here’s the root of human self-reflection and self awareness
[su_panel color="#3A3A3A" border="1px solid #3A3A3A" radius="2" text_align="left"]Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness by ...
Mars has all the ingredients necessary to support life — in its subsurface
[A] new paper in Astrobiology shows that there might very well be a place where life can sustain itself on ...
Video: Discovery of Homo naledi suggests ‘maybe brain size isn’t all it’s cracked up to be’ when it comes to human evolution
The small brains of Homo naledi raise new questions about the evolution of human brain size. Big brains were costly ...
Humans lived in caves in Africa and used fire and tools as far as two million years ago
A large cave nestled in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert might be the first on Earth to have housed human activity, ...
Anti-aging pill for women? Neutraceutical in development shows significant promise in improving muscle health
A small clinical trial of postmenopausal women with prediabetes shows that the compound NMN (nicotinamide mononucleotide) improved the ability of ...
Viewpoint: What’s causing an explosion in incidents of Parkinson’s disease? Do household products play a role?
[Ray] Dorsey, a neurologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center and author of Ending Parkinson’s Disease, believes a Parkinson’s ...
10 cases in the world: Here’s the remarkable story of woman who got pregnant while already carrying a baby
Noah's first close-ups, taken by ultrasound at seven and 10 weeks into the pregnancy, showed 39-year-old mom Rebecca Roberts and ...
3-D technology is reinventing paleoanthropology and the reconstruction of fossils
In 2018 a student excavator, Samantha Good, came upon the adult male skull of a Paranthropus robustus, lying upside down, ...
Viewpoint: A case for moderate exercise — We get the most cognitive benefits by ‘performing activities that we evolved to perform’
Your body clearly benefits from a daily moderate level of exercising. Does your brain care? Yes, your brain does pay ...
Video: Viewpoint — The upside is immense but ‘threats from CRISPR gene editing are too big to ignore’
CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a revolutionary technology that gives scientists the ability to alter DNA. On ...
Lack of sleep nearly doubles risk of sexual dysfunction, concludes Mayo Clinic study
Consistently getting a bad night's sleep may lead to an unsatisfactory sex life for many older women, a new study ...
Still-unnamed rare genetic disease linked to abnormal brain development in children
Scientists have discovered a new genetic disease, which causes some children’s brains to develop abnormally, resulting in delayed intellectual development ...
2.5 billion: That’s how many T. rexes may have roamed the Earth over their 3-million-year reign
On average, researchers estimate that some 20,000 T. rex lived at any one time and that about 127,000 generations of ...
Does your child snore? Links found to brain changes and behavioral problems as they grow older
[R]esearchers examined MRI images collected from more than 10,000 children aged 9 to 10 years enrolled in the Adolescent Brain ...
Infographic: Gene therapy drugs that silence the effects of faulty genes could help tackle Huntington’s and other neurodegenerative diseases
Huntington’s disease (HD) is an inherited condition that causes widespread deterioration in the brain and disrupts thinking, behaviour, emotion and ...
Why humans evolved to be the sweatiest of the Great Apes
Humans have a uniquely high density of sweat glands embedded in their skin — 10 times the density of chimpanzees ...
Opioid vaccine could rein in addictions? Shot in development targets fentanyl, blocks drug from reaching the brain
Research is underway to develop a twice-per-year vaccine that may help people overcome opioid addiction. The vaccine, which is being ...
How our brain balances and blends past experiences with current perceptions
Our ability to make sense of our surroundings, to learn, to act and to think all depend on constant, nimble ...
Viewpoint: Why are misconceptions about transgender youth so widespread? Maybe too many people listen to misinformed pundits like FOX’s Tucker Carlson
[Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson has] repeatedly mangled and misrepresented the science on gender dysphoria and transgender youth. ... "There ...
Not only did humans exchange DNA with Neanderthals — we shared culture as well
Between ~45,000 to 40,000 years ago [humans and Neanderthals were] contemporaries and had ample time to meet and interact. New ...
Personalized medicine: ‘Race’ matters when it comes to genetic diseases and hard-wired drug responses
Although race is a social rather than biological construct, there are inherited genetic variations that play a role in drug ...
Humans are ‘super-predators’ hardwired by evolution to hunt our food sources into extinction
Humans are natural born killers: super-predators designed by evolution to subsist mainly on the meat and fat of large animals, ...
Can CRISPR gene editing help address climate change while producing lower impact biofuels?
Biofuels have long been proposed as the alternative fuel source of the future. Despite these high hopes, the commercialisation of ...
