Science Controversies
Peruvian village where many men go blind by 50 leads to stigmitization
Parán is a small dusty village in the foothills of the Andes in Peru, and for a long time, everyone ...
GMO, non-GMO, conventional, organic? Clearer terms needed to limit misleading ads and labeling
Today a very high percentage of livestock feed and processed food for human consumption is produced from transgenic modified seed ...
Zimbabweans have consumed GMOs safely for a decade, contrary to minister’s claims
A few days ago, NewZimbabwe.com published an article entitled "GMOs remain banned in Zim, Made" in which the Agriculture, Mechanisation ...
Humans speed natural species extinction by 1,000 years
First the bad news. Humans are driving species to extinction at around 1000 times the natural rate, at the top ...
Near-extinct American chestnut trees make comeback with help from genetic modification
The near-extinct American chestnut looks set to make a comeback. Genetically modified trees, which are resistant to a deadly fungus ...
Metabolic changes in human evolution: Hungry brains and frugal muscles
For decades, scientists have wondered how our metabolism compares to that of other species. It’s been a hard question to ...
Public mislead about organics: GM and conventional food as safe, healthy, nutritious
The verdict in the Australia courts rejecting the claim of an organic farmer than his GM-farming neighbor was "contaminating" his ...
Marvel’s X-Men fan? Then you should appreciate ‘special powers’ of ‘mutant’ GM crops
From the origins of their 'special powers' to GMO labeling and mutant registration, the parallels between the debate over GMOs ...
Predicting behavior based on our genes just got more complicated
How can we predict organisms behavior and physiology from their genomes? The language of DNA was always thought to be ...
Western Australia court ruling highlights need for law reform to include ‘biotrespass’
The supreme court of Western Australia handed down a landmark decision yesterday, on genetically modified crop liability. The ruling in Marsh ...
California lawmakers reject GMO-labeling bill for second time in two years
California lawmakers on Wednesday rejected a bill that would require labels on foods made with genetically modified organisms (GMOs), the ...
Turkish government denies changing regulations to permit sale of food products containing up to 0.9 percent GM ingredients
A change made to the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Animal Husbandry regulations now permits the production and sale of ...
RIKEN stem cell scientist Obokata may retract stem cell paper
Reports in Japan suggest Haruko Obokata, of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, has agreed to retract one ...
Vermont’s GMO-labeling bill success was not about ‘right-to-know’ but clear vote against conventional agriculture
The incredible success of the GMO labeling bill was in actuality not about the “right to know” what is in ...
Wisconsin allows police to track rape suspects through relatives’ DNA
Wisconsin has joined a handful of states in allowing familial DNA testing — a powerful but debatable procedure — to ...
GMO opposition is fierce, but not much of it based on science
A more sober assessment of the public GMO debate reveals that it's not really about the science of the safety ...
Cultural divide deepens in Oregon as GMO bans signal Portlandia-fication of farming
Jackson county's new ban on most GMO crops has deepened a cultural chasm in the greater Rogue Valley and Oregon ...
“Outbreak” redux: Is lab research on influenza worth the risk of a pandemic?
What happens when you mix human error, deadly disease and lab animals? Hollywood would have us believe imminent disaster. Fear ...
Congressional briefing raises concerns about new GMO crops with 2,4-D herbicide resistance
The next argument over genetically engineered crops has arrived with Dow AgroScience’s bid to gain federal approval for soybean and ...
European Comission rejects citizen group’s plea to ban all human embryo research
The European Commission has today replied to the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) 'One of Us'. After having met with the ...
DNA of colorblindness: One woman’s take on how the genetic lottery shaped her family
My 7-year-old son has fallen in love with Rainbow Loom, the wildly popular sets of pegs and rubber bands kids ...
After mapping human genome, scientists release catalog of proteins that help make them work
Two teams of scientists are publishing first drafts of the human proteome. The proteome is a catalog of all of ...
Personalized precision cancer treatments tailored to your genes improving but hurdles high
Elaine Mardis and her colleagues first encountered 39-year-old Lucy in 2010 at the Genome Institute at Washington University in St ...
Gene therapy hot again as success stories roll in
In the early 2000s, gene therapy seemed to be on life support. The once-promising technique, which uses engineered viruses and ...
Western Australian farmer Michael Baxter’s win a big step forward for co-existence between organic, GM crops
The Western Australia Supreme Court’s decision to award Kojonup GM canola farmer Michael Baxter victory over his organic farming neighbour ...
3000 rice genomes released into public domain to boost food production
As a step toward boosting rice production to meet a projected 25 percent increase in demand by 2030, researchers from three Asian ...
GM wheat–Is the potential being overstated as some scientists claim?
My colleague (and chief wheat breeder) at Oklahoma State University was recently interviewed by Ag Journal, and he expressed reservations about GMO wheat ...
