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.
The Great migrations in the US in the first half of the 20th century show up in our genes
[Software engineer Chengzhen Dai] and his advisor, designer and engineer Carlo Ratti, teamed up with population geneticist Alicia Martin of ...
Why we lie and the challenge of being honest
We lie when we think we can get away with it. We lie more in groups, especially if we see other ...
50 straight years: Japan again sets new centenarian record at 80,450, almost all women
As of mid-September 2020, there are 80,450 centenarians in Japan. This is the largest number ever, a record that has ...
Evolution and the downsides of being so smart
With misinformation and disinformation about the pandemic, “cheap” and “deep” fakes of elected officials, and targeted ads and emotionally exploitative social media algorithms, ...
Can we predict where dangerous animal-borne viruses will appear next?
[G]iven good data, [Ebola, a] notoriously unpredictable zoonotic – or animal-borne – disease, which is passed to humans via primates ...
Designing a more effective flu vaccine
A growing body of evidence suggests that a history of exposure to influenza virus might be undermining the effectiveness of ...
Combining immunotherapy and nanotechnology to fight deadly metastatic breast cancer
Efstathios "Stathis" Karathanasis, an associate professor of biomedical engineering, is directing [a] novel technique—sending nanoparticles into the body to wake ...
Dream Bank: Analysis of 38,000 dreams yield fresh insights
In the largest digital dream study so far, researchers at Cambridge University’s Nokia Bell Labs in the U.K. recently created ...
Perception that US botched coronavirus response sends global reputation plummeting
As a new 13-nation Pew Research Center survey illustrates, America’s reputation has declined further over the past year among many ...
‘Complicated, messy and random’: Synthesizing old and new perspectives on human evolution
Darwin made astute observations about our kind and predictions about our ancient past based on the information that was available ...
After prehistoric asteroid destroyed most life on Earth, why were birds able to survive?
With hindsight, birds can be categorized as avian dinosaurs and all the other sorts—from Stegosaurus to Brontosaurus—are non-avian dinosaurs. The ...
How you can train your brain to reduce motion sickness
With the concept of autonomous vehicles coming closer to our roads, the need to reduce motion sickness is more apparent ...
Can listening to Mozart reduce epileptic seizures?
In a paper published in the journal Clinical Neurophysiology and just presented at a virtual meeting of the European College of ...
Drugs tailored to your personal genomics: New partnership between 23andMe and GlaxoSmithKline
The California-based [23andMe] is now focused on a partnership with pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline to discover new drugs using data culled ...
Can we use DNA to sketch the faces of criminals?
Most labs studying DNA phenotyping look for relationships between changes to individual letters of a person’s genetic code, known as ...
Ostrich Paradox: How our inability to process risk is crippling responses to COVID
The question is… Why do some take the threat of the virus more seriously than others? Your risk of contracting ...
Venus shows signs of life. Here’s what it means
We have only had the briefest of glimpses of a barren landscape from the two Russian landers that made it down to ...
Brain hunger: The hunt to understand loneliness
Kay Tye set out to answer a question that has taken on new resonance in the age of social distancing: ...
IF – intermittent fasting: How and why it works
IF comes in three main flavors: alternate-day fasting, when people alternate between feast days (eating normally or a little extra) and ...
Asians and Blacks dramatically under-represented in medical research, distorting drug therapy effectiveness
A 2018 analysis of studies looking for genetic variants associated with disease found that under-representation [of minorities] persists: 78% of ...
Here’s why children learn languages more easily than adults
Previous brain scanning research and the clinical findings of language loss in patients who suffered a left hemisphere stroke have ...
Best defense against Alzheimer’s: Deep, restorative sleep
[A] study, recently published by investigators at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, suggests that defense against Alzheimer’s disease is ...
Pediatrician on her personal awakening as mother of a transgender daughter
Being a pediatrician and mother of three, I didn’t think there were many parenting scenarios that could catch me unprepared ...
Like milk and cheese? How lactose tolerance spread through Europe 4,000 years ago
The human ability to digest the milk sugar lactose after infancy spread throughout Central Europe in only a few thousand ...
What can stop COVID? How do pandemics end?
The promise of a vaccine for COVID-19 is inching closer to reality, with some candidate vaccines already approaching the last big hurdle ...
Plagued by chronic illnesses, elderly blacks dying at alarming rate
They are perishing quietly, out of sight, in homes and apartment buildings, senior housing complexes, nursing homes and hospitals, disproportionately poor, frail and ...
The mystery of the human butt
Take a look around the animal kingdom. Even our closest living relatives among the great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas), ...
