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.
Flu vaccine makers plan to increase production as they brace for unprecedented winter season
Even though flu season doesn’t begin until the fall, major flu vaccine manufacturers say they plan to boost production by ...
Why sex matters in medicine
The last time I saw Maria-Rosa, she was on a stretcher, surrounded by frantic nurses and interns who were trying, ...
Vikings were not the first global voyagers. Bronze age Norwegians likely sailed the seas 2,000 years before
[A]rchaeologists who study Norway during the Bronze Age have discovered a great deal of new information. ... People who lived ...
Anti-vaxxers don’t want safer vaccines, they want no vaccines
“I try to look and see where the evidence takes me.” Does this statement sound reasonable? If I told you ...
5 biggest differences between 23andMe, MyHeritage and AncestryDNA
1) Extra Offerings In addition to their well-known ancestry tests, each of these companies also has extra features that can ...
Why did fatherhood evolve?
We might take the doting modern dad for granted, but if you take a look at the rest of the ...
Opening the floodgates to synthetic biology innovations in drugs, textiles, agricultural products and advanced materials
Today’s DNA makers still create their products using chemistry. To form a new double helix, the individual letters of DNA ...
Why your morning cup of coffee sends you running to the bathroom
Coffee makes you poop. That's a fact, right? It must be, since you can buy t-shirts or mugs with that ...
Human organ factories? Defense Department seeds Segway inventor Dean Kamen’s ambitious project, but success seems years away
[N]one of [Dean Kamen’s] many inventions — including the Segway — has an impact that comes close to what could ...
Concerned about ‘fake news’? It could get a lot worse with AI
Fake news has certainly become a widespread and insidious problem, and in a year when we’re dealing with both a ...
350 million years ago, a thinning atmosphere sparked a mass extinction. We’re headed in the same direction
Scientists noticed that around the time of the Hangenberg Crisis, [fern] spores began to look strange. Some were much darker ...
Mindfulness relieves labor pain, improves postnatal recovery
Research has shown that even under extreme circumstances, like during childbirth, we can (and should) practice mindfulness. Of course, it ...
Eliminating Parkinson’s may eventually be possible with a ‘stunning’ single treatment
[Researchers found] a new therapeutic approach for Parkinson’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. Just a single treatment to inhibit [the ...
How an event in what is now the United States may have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire
With a new analysis of particles found in ice cores, researchers determined that [Alaskan volcano] Okmok's eruption coincided with Rome's ...
Symphony of scents: Why do flowers smell different from rotting fish?
In the deep recesses of the nose are millions of sensory neurons that, along with our eyes and ears, help ...
The lonelier you are, the more disconnected your self-image
Before going in an fMRI scanner, participants were asked to name and rank five people whom they are closest to ...
Motivation complex: What explains that extra burst of energy as we near completing a goal or task?
Whatever it is you’re striving to achieve, science shows you’re likely to push harder the closer you feel to the ...
Extraterrestrial alert: 737 places where aliens might be hiding
The Exotica Catalog was put together by researchers from Breakthrough Listen, a decade-long program seeking to find signs of intelligent ...
Unlocking the ‘deepest secrets of our brains as we grow and age’
Just as our human relationships and connections can nudge, push, or dramatically shift societal values and consequences, the connections between ...
Zealandia revealed: Maps and interactive tools uncover backstory of Earth’s ‘lost’ eighth continent
Earth's eighth continent is 94% underwater.... ... Zealandia — or Te Riu-a-Māui, as it's referred to in the indigenous Māori ...
Sniff test: How our sense of smell appears to signal whether an unresponsive patient might recover consciousness
Even with more recent technologies, such as brain imaging, the rate of misdiagnosis in DOC [disorders of consciousness] patients could ...
If every virus was wiped off the earth, ‘the world will be a wonderful place—for about a day and a half, and then we’d all die’
If given the choice to magically wave a wand and cause all viruses to disappear, most people would probably jump ...
Viewpoint: Blacks raise questions about racial stereotyping of autism diagnoses and therapies
Part of the reason people are quick to stereotype me is that there is no research on middle-aged black women ...
Why did menopause evolve?
To explain menopause, any hypothesis needs a plausible evolutionary scenario. It is reasonable to assume that the chimp/human common ancestor ...
Prebiotics: How best to protect your skin and why daily showers may not be a good idea
Now couldn’t be a weirder time to question washing. I’ve spent the past three years reporting on how our notions ...
What caused anatomically modern Homo sapiens to evolve into behaviorally modern people?
At some point, from around 40,000 years ago in Europe, we see evidence of these behaviourally modern humans in a ...
For those with limited genetic knowledge, at-home ancestry tests fuel misconceptions that genes dictate race
University of Pennsylvania sociologist Wendy Roth [wondered] whether these do-it-yourself tests also fueled the idea that genes dictate race. After ...
