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.
How fake AI satellite imagery is impacting Iran war coverage
An unprecedented wave of AI-generated misinformation about the US-Israel war with Iran is being monetised by online creators with growing ...
Trump administration resorts to censorship to counter what it claims is rampant censorship by European governments
In early 2025, aides to Vice President JD Vance ordered a small office at the State Department to document how ...
RFK Jr.’s vaccine panel member quits in anger after judge says he’s not qualified
Dr. Robert Malone, vice chair of the federal committee that recommends vaccines to Americans, angrily resigned his position on Tuesday ...
Viewpoint: Off-shore wind advocates face uphill battle challenging Trump’s war on sustainable energy
... Trump has declared that the US will see “no new windmills,” the type of comment that many in the ...
As teen suicides pile up, AI companies squirm to avert accountability
It was Amaurie’s younger sister who discovered the body. She was also the one who was looking through her brother’s ...
How to “vaccinate” against mis- and disinformation
As part of BBC Media Action’s broader effort to understand what works in tackling information disorder, we’re testing proactive responses to ...
Viewpoint: The Trump-RFK, Jr. anti-vaccine circus has yet another act, and it’s getting worse
Three weeks ago in a CIDRAP Op-Ed, I argued that the reconstituted Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) was preparing to ...
Viewpoint: ‘Structural racism’ isn’t a myth and it can kill you
Across countries and decades, evidence links discriminatory housing, education, and health systems to higher mortality, greater disease burden, and poorer ...
Viewpoint: Climate change propaganda and disinformation are now the official position of the U.S. government
The Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists recently won a court case against the administration which forced it to ...
Viewpoint—Tech pseudoscience: The limits of AI and machine learning
Machine Learning (ML) is a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI), where a neural network is ‘trained’ to recognise patterns, in order ...
The most developed countries have declining birth rates, endangering their economies—or maybe not
Low fertility rates—the average number of children born to a woman—may not spell economic trouble after all, scientists say. In ...
40% of American adults have confidence in RFK Jr.’s leadership on health, and the numbers are sinking
Americans are losing confidence in the nation’s public health agencies, according to a survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center ...
Viewpoint: How ‘fake news’ shapes our behavior?
In recent years, the spread of fake news—particularly in the health domain—has become a significant concern. Misinformation about medical treatments, vaccines, ...
The Trump administration pledged to speed approval of rare disease drugs. The reality is the opposite
Rare disease breaks the traditional math of drug development. Companies can’t run a 10,000-patient trial when only a few thousand ...
Viewpoint: ‘The battle to feed humanity is over”: Eco-pessimist Paul Ehrlich leaves a legacy of misinformation about the mortal threat of overpopulation
The butterfly biologist turned rock-star eco-pessimist, Paul Ehrlich has died at the age of 93. That in itself is remarkable ...
As vaccine disinformation sweeps the country, pediatricians struggle to respond
Across the country, clinicians like Dr. [Alissa] Parker, who also holds a doctorate in nursing practice, are contending with a ...
Supreme Court likely to have final say on RFK, Jr.’s currently-blocked vaccine policy
Although a federal judge in Boston has temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s changes to the US childhood immunization schedule, the ...
Pentagon nears use of untested AI in life-and-death war targeting decisions
The US military might use generative AI systems to rank lists of targets and make recommendations—which would be vetted by ...
Grassroots MAHA pushes back against White House plan to back away from anti-vaccine rhetoric
White House officials are steering the Trump administration away from vaccine reform, fearing the political consequences of emphasizing a relatively ...
RFK, Jr.’s choice for U.S. Covid vaccine czar accused of unethical and misleading research
The MIT professor who has been appointed by Robert F Kennedy Jr to review the safety of Covid-19 vaccines has failed to ...
Viewpoint: Should you quit ChatGPT on ethical grounds?
QuitGPT is one of the latest salvos in a growing movement by activists and disaffected users to cancel their subscriptions ...
RFK, Jr. vaccine rebuke: Judge reverses Trump administration childhood and Covid vaccine policies
In a severe blow to the Trump administration’s health agenda, a federal judge in Massachusetts [on March 16, 2026] blocked the ...
Iran creates an alternate war reality: Social networks awash with AI-generated videos showing its fake destructive power
A torrent of fake videos and images generated by artificial intelligence have overrun social networks during the first weeks of ...
White House clamps down on RFK, Jr.’s vaccine rejectionism but he reportedly retains Trump’s support
The White House is more tightly controlling the messaging and policies—including around vaccines—coming from the Department of Health and Human ...
AI tools designed to combat misinformation may actually promote it
As online misinformation grows harder to detect, new artificial-intelligence tools promise to help us separate fact from fiction. But do ...
The intersection of vaccinations and faith: Should the ultra-religious get exemptions from mandatory vaccines shots?
From the perspective of mainstream scientific medicine, the choice between vaccination and potentially fatal diseases seem obvious. So are religious ...
Malaysia fighting a losing battle against climate disinformation
In today’s digital and AI-shaped information environment, disinformation has become a systemic risk, weakening trust, distorting decision-making, and ultimately undermining ...
