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.
Nature appears to have uniform laws guiding existence and evolution. Why?
In many ways, it’s the most remarkable fact of all about the Universe: that the constituents, the laws, and the ...
Despite the vast diversity of the size, shape and behavior of dogs, they share a deep evolutionary history
The oldest fossil that scientists agree came from a dog, rather than a wolf, comes from a site in Germany ...
Health and wellness manipulation: 10 ways behavior-savvy companies sell their products
In an effort to cut through the noise and capture your limited attention, marketing companies often invoke the logical fallacy—an ...
Most of the population of Eastern and Southern England descended from Nordic populations bordering the North Sea
Almost 300 years after the Romans left, scholars like Bede wrote about the Angles and the Saxons and their migrations ...
What are the emotional and financial consequences of the struggle to treat depression?
Depressed patients with prior treatment failure often face high medical costs and poor quality of life, a new survey suggested ...
‘Blood on your hands’: WHO says richer nations cannot back away from helping the developing world still coping with COVID
If rich nations think the pandemic is over, they should help lower-income countries reach that point too, a senior World ...
Fertility clinic is unavailable or too expensive? One woman’s experience using a ‘global fertility courier’ to find affordable, quality reproductive care
Like me, my eggs were flying economy class. We—my dog Stewie and I—were in seat 8D, while 12 of my ...
Viewpoint: Blind optimism — Cynicism plays an important role in science but it won’t help us solve the world’s most crushing problems
Pessimism sounds smart. Optimism sounds dumb. It’s no wonder, then, that pessimistic messages hit the headlines, and optimistic ones hardly ...
Groove to the music? A ‘rhythm gene’ might help set the limits of your dancing skills
The first large-scale genomic study of musicality — published on the cover of September 19 Nature Human Behaviour — identified ...
Can you damage your body by regularly donating blood?
One question has plagued the field of blood donation for as long as there have been transfusions: Are we harming ...
Australia’s plan to become first country to offer preventive disease gene screening is under microscope
Last month, Monash University launched DNA Screen, offering 10,000 people aged 18 to 40 “secure, free DNA testing to identify ...
‘Brain training’ video games help elderly people resist age-related mental deterioration
You may be able to prevent or delay dementia with changes in diet and exercise, research has found. Now another ...
Keeping and caring for animals: Evidence emerges that human-animal bond reaches back 13,000 years ago
Hunter-gatherer groups living in southwest Asia may have started keeping and caring for animals nearly 13,000 years ago — roughly ...
Gender and consciousness: ‘If you woke up tomorrow without a body, would you be able to guess your gender?’
Here’s a question I’ve been pitting to friends and family this last month: if tomorrow you woke up without a ...
What happens when a word pops into your brain? Learning how we think could help improve artificial intelligence (AI)
Embodied cognition proposes that people understand the words for objects through how they interact with them, so the researchers devised ...
Test your embryo for disease? DNA scan that ‘ranks’ embryos based on heart disease and mental illness risks raises ethical questions
“She has her mother’s eyes,” begins the advertisement, “but will she also inherit her breast cancer diagnosis?” The smooth voice ...
Ocean organisms form the basis for numerous innovative drugs including COVID treatment remdesivir. Should the seas’ genetic resources be commercialized?
Genetic material from high seas organisms and the digital data from sequencing their genomes could be used to develop new ...
‘Rituals and intelligence evolved side by side’: How culture has shaped human evolution
No other animal uses ritual as extensively and compulsively as Homo sapiens. In fact, archaeologists often consider ritual to be ...
When will we see a combined annual shot for flu and COVID? Moderna CEO talks about dual shot timeline and research on personalized cancer vaccine
Moderna Inc. didn’t have an approved product before the pandemic hit. Now it is a household name, as the maker of ...
What makes some societies more radicalized and violent than others?
What makes a society resilient against radicalization? The researchers want to determine if there are any common features. And they ...
Does your sweat reek? It could be protecting you from serious illnesses
Back in 2020, [microbiologist Gavin] Thomas and his colleagues found that one critter on the skin, called Staphylococcus hominis, produces an especially pungent ...
‘3 parent’ embryo study: Chinese researchers show diseased mitochondria can be successfully replaced to prevent inherited disease
When the first baby to be conceived using a technique that mixes genetic material from three people was born, in 2016, ...
Do you take creatine as a workout supplement? It could soon be used to treat depression
A bounty of evidence shows that taking creatine supplements raises the threshold of fatigue, which particularly comes in handy for ...
We’re often too nervous to offer acts of kindness. Why?
In August of last year, BBC Radio 4 teamed up with psychologists at the University of Sussex to launch the ...
What drove the ascension of humanity? This one gene was critical
More than 500,000 years ago, the ancestors of Neanderthals and modern humans were migrating around the world when a pivotal ...
How did dogs evolve to be such close partners with humans? It may be helpful to look to mythology as well as science
The similarities between wolves and early domesticated dogs can make it challenging for researchers to tell them apart. In the ...
Can you recall an emotionally charged moment? This single molecule drives whether that memory is good or bad
As Salk Institute postdoctoral researcher Hao Li and his team reported recently in Nature, the difference between memories that conjure ...
