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.
How a ‘selfie’ and AI could be used to diagnose heart disease
It is known already that certain facial features are associated with an increased risk of heart disease. These include thinning ...
When the brain adjusts what we see, is it distorting reality?
[From a few feet away, a manhole cover] looks circular, but this is because of some impressive perceptual machinery in ...
First Contact with aliens could be a life-altering event. How should we respond?
Peter Hatfield and Leah Trueblood from the University of Oxford say that our experience with the COVID-19 pandemic is preparing ...
ALS may soon be treatable with new drug combo dreamed up by a college student
Patients who took [an experimental medication for ALS] — initially dreamed up over beers and obsessive internet searching in a Brown ...
Electroacupuncture: Promising pain therapy or quackery?
One idea [for alternative pain relief] is to specifically stimulate nerves that act as highway carriers of pain signals and ...
Human blood suckers: How nature’s tiniest killer developed its deadly diet
Although most of the roughly 3,500 mosquito species don’t feed on human blood, the Aedes aegypti is one of the worst. Its ...
The woman who challenged 19th century conventional wisdom: Are females ‘biologically barred from success’?
One of the first women to scientifically debunk men's alleged superiority, [trailblazing psychologist Leta Stetter] Hollingworth’s research lent credibility to ...
Interstellar evolution: Why life could emerge anywhere in the universe
[T]he impetus to go interstellar might have nothing to do with dreams of exploration or empire, but all to do with ...
Our gut bacteria helps us naturally battle cancer
Dr. Kathy McCoy, PhD, is a leading expert on the body's relationship with the microbiome. She and her team are ...
Why it will be so difficult to develop a vaccine to prevent opioid addiction
[P]atients taking opioids for chronic pain can produce antibodies to the drugs, which could help explain some of the side-effects ...
Are facial expressions universal?
Faces depicted in sculptures crafted between 3,500 and 600 years ago in Mexico and Central America convey five varieties of ...
Systemic racial disparity among lung cancer diagnoses has nearly vanished, study finds
Because of deeply-rooted systemic problems, Black Americans tend to experience disproportionate rates of many common illnesses. However, a recent study ...
Wooly rhinos driven to extinction by climate change not human hunters
The reign of woolly rhinos, which lasted for millions of years, came to an abrupt end some 14,000 years ago, ...
Amazon Halo Band: Health and wellness tracker or useless (but clever) gadget?
[Amazon’s new health and wellness wristband and app, Amazon Halo, can] track body-fat percentage, heart rate and its users’ activity ...
Getting a flu shot this fall as the pandemic rages could literally save your life
Uncertainty looms over flu season every year, but this time there are even more unknowns than usual — from precisely what ...
Video: Can drugs be made for viruses that do not exist yet?
[N]ovel coronaviruses seem to be making successful jumps to humans very roughly once per decade — and there’s no reason to think they’ll ...
Why beauty is genetically hardwired
Charles Darwin’s second book, following upon On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, has received far less attention than ...
Herpes cure? Gene therapy may work
Infectious disease researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have used a gene editing approach to remove latent herpes simplex ...
Elon Musk unveils Neuralink brain implant in live pigs that could lead to integrating computers into humans
In an announcement on 28 August, Neuralink unveiled prototypes of its device and showed off pigs with the devices implanted ...
What would life on Earth be like if humans were wiped out?
What would happen to our planet — to our cities, to our industries, to nature — if humans disappeared? There ...
DNA testing reveals buried family secrets
[T]echnology has a way of creating new consequences for old decisions. Today, some 30 million people have taken consumer DNA ...
Here’s why women are overmedicated
Researchers analyzed data from several thousand medical journal articles and found clear evidence of a drug dose gender gap for ...
What do medical experts say about Black NFL players’ lawsuit claiming discrimination on dementia diagnoses
The question of adjusting cognitive test scores arose this week when two Black former NFL players filed a lawsuit alleging that the ...
Viewpoint: Here’s why it’s a big mistake to genetically engineer people
Studies in animals, including one described recently in Wired, show that the gene manipulation technique CRISPR has a habit of ...
Gene editing may soon be able to cure inherited deafness. Here’s why some deaf parents oppose it
In June, researchers at Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard and MIT announced that, using mice, they figured out how to use ...
An effective test to diagnose onset of Alzheimer’s
The slow-burning fuse of Alzheimer’s creates a terrible predicament for doctors, patients and the scientists working to develop therapies: Once ...
DNA testing in the workplace
To help prevent genetic discrimination, Congress passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA). Let’s take a look at this law ...
