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.
Viewpoint: The US was a leader in 20th century forced sterilizations. Roe v Wade debacle highlights America’s long history with regulating women’s bodies
More than 60,000 people were sterilized in the U.S. in the 20th century on the basis of eugenics — the ...
Manipulating nature: Should rats implanted with human brain cells be treated differently than unaltered test rodents?
A few months after they’d been implanted, the human cells made up around a sixth of the rats’ brains and ...
Reading comprehension genes: 27 newly-identified genetic variants tied to dyslexia
It is estimated that about 10% of the UK population, about 6.3 million people, are dyslexic. Previous research has suggested ...
‘So much more than cave-dwelling thugs with clubs’: Neanderthal DNA gives us a look into ancient family life
One of the things that makes us special as a species is our ability to form communities, but we humans ...
The Song of the Cell: Oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee’s new book explains the mystery of how the body’s smallest unit affects everything from IVF to COVID
“The Song of the Cell,” the latest work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning oncologist, recounts our evolving understanding of the body’s ...
High blood pressure medication only works for 1 in 4 people. Genetics may help explain why
Nearly half of American adults have high blood pressure, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent ...
IVF-born Black babies are four times more likely to die than White babies. Why?
It has been well-known in research that Black babies are about twice as likely to die as White babies before ...
First large-scale long COVID study finds nearly half of survivors experience lingering symptoms
Ask anyone who has experienced the lingering maladies of the pandemic, and they’ll tell you long covid is no figment ...
‘Just because we can do it, should we?’ How CRISPR co-creator Jennifer Doudna is furthering the discussion over the ethics of human genome editing
In 2012, Jennifer Doudna, then a relatively unknown biochemist at the University of California Berkeley, published a paper with Emmanuelle Charpentier ...
Why did so many girls experience early puberty during the pandemic? (The virus might not be to blame)
Among the laundry list of health problems COVID has inflicted on the world's population, one of the more perplexing could ...
Hair-straightening products connected to uterine cancer, especially in Black women
Scientists are uncovering new details in the connection between using certain hair straightening products, such as chemical relaxers and pressing ...
‘Obesity is way more complex than we thought’: Risk of being overweight likely influenced by what happened in the womb
Obesity can seriously compromise a person’s physical and mental health. It is definedTrusted Source as “abnormal or excessive fat accumulation ...
Kaftrio miracle: How a new suite of genetically-tuned drugs are challenging cystic fibrosis – and opening door for victims to have children
Today, the full DNA map is commonly used in developing new drugs and other healthcare solutions. Genetic sequencing has become ...
New method that could help spot alien life: Tracking oxygen levels across the universe
Are we alone in the universe? This is a question that has intrigued humans for centuries and inspired countless studies ...
CRISPR cryptography: Making the world safer from gene-editing research gone awry
Evolution is Kevin Esvelt’s passion: how it works in nature, how we can direct it, and how it can go ...
Drilling down on the roots of chronic fatigue syndrome? 200 genetic variants now linked to the disorder
Scientists have discovered possible genetic risk factors involved in chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). ME/CFS ...
Are you a mosquito magnet? It’s in the genes
As part of their three-year study, the scientists carried out more than 2,330 tests over 174 days using samples of ...
COVID booster uptake is at an all-time low. This shot campaign could save thousands of lives and billions of dollars
Boosters are a necessary part of COVID-19 mitigation because vaccine-induced and natural protection against disease have been shown to be transient ...
Air pollution linked to greater risk of obesity in women
Obesity has been a major global health issue in recent decades as more people eat unhealthy diets and fail to ...
Why dementia screening is critical: For people under 60, brain impairment appears up to 9 years before clinical diagnosis
Signs of brain impairment appeared as early as 9 years before people received a diagnosis for Alzheimer's or other dementia-related ...
Viewpoint: Our personalities are genetically shaped but not hardwired
Everything about us is partly genetic, but this doesn’t mean genes determine our traits. Our genes assemble every aspect of ...
Does Hollywood’s new favorite viral weight loss drug Wegovy (Ozempic) work — or is it just another fad pill?
Ozempic, or Wegovy, is a new class of medication that belongs to GLP-1 agonists. It was first developed as a ...
DNA USB key? How we could store data for potentially thousands of years using the genetic code
The information stored in DNA defines what it is to be human (or any other species for that matter). But ...
‘Apex predators’: For 2.5 million years, early humans stood atop the food chain, eating mostly meat
Paleolithic cuisine was anything but lean and green, according to a study on the diets of our Pleistocene ancestors. For ...
Ancestry vulnerability: Inherited metabolic differences key to understanding disease patterns
Our ancestry can be detected not only in our genes, but also in our metabolism, a new Yale-led study has ...
Viewpoint: ‘Fashionable nonsense’ — Why embracing a ‘sex spectrum’ is at odds with scientific data
The scientific community is increasingly embracing sociopolitical ideologies and philosophies that are blatantly at odds with scientific data. The highest ...
AI has made massive strides in recent years — but it can’t perfectly replicate human language. What makes this task so complicated?
Researchers in artificial intelligence have made extraordinary strides in mimicking human language—but they still can’t capture the parts that truly ...
