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.
AI is accelerating climate disinformation. It’s going to get worse
Climate disinformation has evolved over the last decade. What was once straightforward climate denial has given way to more subtle ...
Menopause symptoms? Social media is rife with misinformation
A women's health expert is warning against taking advice from social media feeds when it comes to hormone therapy. The ...
Longevity cure? Don’t waste your money on NAD anti-aging supplements. They don’t work
Recent studies on aging have latched onto a “player” in longevity that had hitherto received little attention: nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, ...
Here’s how social media turbocharges the rising wave of health misinformation
Social media has turned everyone into a wellness expert. A gym selfie becomes proof of medical authority. A viral reel ...
Paywall science predicament: AI answers often skew toward misinformation
When researchers Matthew Magnani of the University of Maine and Jon Clindaniel of the University of Chicago tried prompting ChatGPT ...
Anti-vaccine activists are pushing the courts to allow doctors to spread disinformation about shot safety to patients
Doctors who give health advice to their patients or community that runs counter to the medical establishment face a rare ...
Is the longevity treatment boom over-hyped?
At Biograph, a longevity clinic with locations in New York City and San Francisco, an assessment day can last up to ...
Supplements to prevent cancer? They not only don’t work, they can damage your health
Dietary supplements are wildly popular, but large clinical trials and other research by Fred Hutch Cancer Center scientists show that ...
Teaching AI to have a soul
As the resident philosopher of the tech company Anthropic, [Amanda] Askell spends her days learning Claude’s reasoning patterns and talking to the ...
Anti-vaccine hysteria is leading to bleeding deaths in babies
For nearly 65 years, babies in the US have received a dose of vitamin K within hours of their birth ...
Is there a way to stop climate disinformation? Spain has a plan
Propagandists flood our feeds with climate denial, conspiracy theories, and outrage to divide the public, inflame geopolitical tensions and destroy trust in ...
Trump-MAHA coalition near a breaking point?
Donald Trump issued an executive order [on February 18, 2026] to boost production of glyphosate, a widely used pesticide that’s ...
Tuskegee redux: RFK, Jr.’s unapproved, unethical vaccine experiment in Guinea-Bissau
[T]he grant request, marked as unsolicited, proposed a randomized controlled trial in the impoverished West African nation of Guinea-Bissau. The ...
AI-generated images are becoming a tool of government disinformation—even in the United States
Levy Armstrong’s arrest came less than two weeks after the killing of Renée Good in the snowy streets of south ...
Vaccines turbocharge cancer? Misinformation meme explodes online
Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, claims that vaccines can cause severe disease have been widespread on social media, ...
BBC reporter’s guide on how to hack AI to spread disinformation
A growing number of people have figured out a trick to make AI tools tell you almost whatever they want ...
Viewpoint—First year scorecard: ‘The damage HHS secretary Kennedy has done to science and public health is appalling’
It is beyond comprehension that the Senate confirmed [Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.] to oversee America’s health. The risks are so ...
Tens of millions of people rely on TikTok to understand ADHD, and that’s not good
A team led by researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada found that of the top 100 ...
Are you hardwired to have an affair?
As an evolutionary biologist who studies sex and relationships, I’m fascinated by these two truths. We humans make romantic commitments ...
Deepfakes raise profound ethical questions in science
Much of the public concern around deepfakes has focused on abuse, particularly non-consensual intimate imagery, political misinformation, and the erosion ...
9 top RFK, Jr. science controversies
From sweeping changes to vaccination protocols to scientifically dubious assertions about a host of childhood maladies, here are some of ...
Using scare tactics to challenge bogus cures makes people trust false remedies even more
Researchers at Tianjin Normal University ran two experiments with 180 people total (54 undergraduates in the first study, then 126 ...
To challenge the vaccine infodemic, World Health Organization targets social media science
Carlos Mendez (São Paulo, Brazil) watched his father die from COVID-19 in April 2020, gasping for breath in their cramped ...
‘A chill through the entire vaccine industry’: RFK., Jr.’s flip-flop on Moderna’s mRNA vaccine latest setback
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was picked in November 2024 to become the next health secretary, public health experts worried ...
AI regularly passes on misinformation because it relies more on the source than the science
Artificial intelligence tools are more likely to provide incorrect medical advice when the misinformation comes from what the software considers ...
Vaccine rejectionist Jenny McCarthy ridiculed online after again spreading false claim that Tylenol causes autism
Anti-vaccine advocate Jenny McCarthy has sparked backlash on social media after she shared a video discussing the unproven "correlation" between Tylenol's active ...
As science misinformation soars, communicators ponder how to regain public trust
... Technology Networks asked an array of experts the same question: “In an era of rapid information flow and rising misinformation, ...
