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.
Breast reconstruction surgery receiving boost from stem cell technique
It’s hard to pin down exactly how many people get mastectomies in the United States. According to the Journal of the ...
Saving Earth’s biodiversity will rely on conservation, space agencies’ collaboration
Global biodiversity loss is intensifying. But it is hard to assess progress towards the Aichi Biodiversity Targets for 2011–20 set ...
Don’t snooze, you lose: Sleep deprivation has long-lasting consequences for genes, health
There’s a new reason to go to bed on time: late nights, in addition to a multitude of health effects, ...
Children of donors seek greater transparency from sperm banks
A cultural phenomenon is growing these days in the world of gamete donation. The voices of the donor-conceived are growing ...
Can defenders of ‘traditional’ marriage find support from evolutionary science?
Writing in First Things, Ryan T. Anderson proposed a course of action for religious conservatives to defend traditional marriage in ...
Academic performance across subjects may be influenced by same set of genes
You may feel you are just not a maths person, or that you have a special gift for languages, but ...
Gut dwelling hospital infection linked to supermarket meats
One of the most common and troubling infections that occur in healthcare may come from an unexpected source, according to ...
Is there intelligent life in space? Stephen Hawking thinks so, and has launched massive search
More than a half-century after the first modern search for communicating extraterrestrial life, humanity’s quest to find intelligent beings in ...
Natural genetic mutations inspire promising bio-pharmaceutical treatments
Steven Pete can’t feel pain. Timothy Dreyer has bones several times thicker than the average human. Both conditions were caused ...
Not ‘born this way’: Genes suggest sexual orientation fluid, not fixed trait
Gay rights shouldn't depend on how a person came to be gay, and we should embrace the fact that sexuality ...
Dating startup uses controversial / questionable science to help you find your soul mate
In honor of Valentine’s Day, Nazuki Andoh, 37, and Jesse Gronwall, 30, received a small kit in the mail. It contained ...
Antibiotic-resistant superbugs even deadlier than previously thought
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria may be tougher superbugs than previously thought: Not only are these bacteria harder to treat, they appear to ...
Star Trek, synbio and sustainable food: Will Friends of the Earth and other activists block the future?
Far as we are from instantaneous synthesis of food on command, advances in synbio and genetic engineering offer a glimpse ...
Computer program hijacks 23andMe data, raises genetic discrimination concerns
23andMe bills itself as a company that "democratizes personal genetics" for the world. And that description's not necessarily all that ...
A rabbi and an alien walk into a bar: What happens when religious leaders meet extraterrestrials?
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) presents a challenge for the major religions, who might find themselves threatened if alien ...
Cripr-Cas9 DNA editing opens world of possibilities—and Pandora’s box
Crispr-Cas9 makes it easy, cheap, and fast to move genes around—any genes, in any living thing, from bacteria to people ...
US genetic health studies fail to accurately represent country’s ethnic makeup
The clock is ticking for experts charged with designing a U.S. government programme to collect genetic, physiological and other health ...
What did the first humans to leave Africa look like?
The most comprehensive dataset ever assembled on our early human ancestors provides evidence that the first humans emerged in South ...
What has CRISPR accomplished in three years, and what are the dangers we’ll have to face?
Preeminent genetic researchers like David Baltimore, then at MIT, went to the Asilomar conference in 1975 to grapple with the ...
Is editing RNA the key to prolonging life?
If someone was going to attempt to stop aging, what would be the first step? Researchers at the Center for ...
Amazonians distant cousins of Australasians through ancient genetic link
Some people in the Brazilian Amazon are very distant relations of indigenous Australians, New Guineans and other Australasians, two groups ...
Genome’s most confusing features a lot more fun when explained through art
How can cells that contain the same DNA end up so different from each other? That is not only a ...
Some stem cell clinics offer costly, unproven procedures, in US and abroad
Stem cell treatments of various kinds are now widely available in America at more than 100 stem cell clinics offering ...
Can anything be done to stop the growing threat of antibiotic resistance?
Matt Cooper, a medical chemist at the University of Queensland, Australia, puffs out his cheeks and scratches his head. He’s ...
There’s no ‘warrior gene’…but there may be a warrior genotype
I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but you don’t have a gene for being tall, or a gene for caffeine ...
Insatiable sweet tooth? Blame genetics
According to a new study published in the journal Twin Research and Human Genetics, nearly one-third of our ability to taste sweetness comes from ...
Water: California drought yet water bottles everywhere
Humanity's future depends on how we manage our interactions with water. This takes the form of how we package it, ...
