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.
Viewpoint: We’re making big decisions on the coronavirus without solid data
At a time when everyone needs better information, from disease modelers and governments to people quarantined or just social distancing, ...
Infographic: Fighting the coronavirus pandemic with collaborative science and data sharing
On February 27, a teenager in the Seattle area was diagnosed with Covid-19. Shortly after, researchers at the Seattle Flu Study shared genomic data ...
Is being married the key to a longer life?
Mortality – or the frequency of deaths – has been steadily declining in Norway over the last hundred years in ...
Pandemics have existed as long as human civilization: ‘There will be another’
Famine and war routinely bring civilizations low, but though he trots closely beside those two, the horseman who carries off ...
Viewpoint: Coronavirus testing, treatment key to ending national lockdowns
First, the bad news: America’s coronavirus epidemic is only beginning, and the suffering will become more searing over the next ...
Are coronavirus containment efforts more damaging ‘than the direct toll of the virus itself’?
I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life ...
Viewpoint: Watch out for ‘charlatans and scammers’ touting coronavirus cures
The coronavirus pandemic has the whole world's attention. For now, there's no treatment and definitely no cure for COVID-19, the ...
Coronavirus immunotherapy could arrive by early summer. Is ‘record time’ fast enough?
Blood-plasma-based cures aren’t just the stuff of movies. There’s plenty of science to back the idea that blood products from ...
‘Socially clueless robots’? Debunking the myth that autistic people aren’t good at friendship
A number of myths about autistic people abound. For one, it's a great myth that autistic people lack empathy. This ...
‘Just an overreaction’: Inside the world of coronavirus denialism
I created a faux Twitter account and set about building my own information bubble. My objective: Inhabit the world of ...
‘We must have a plan’: Why we need an exit strategy for the coronavirus shutdown
How long is this going to last? As terrible as a pandemic would be, is averting it really worth a ...
Borrowing a trick from cancer cells could be key to improving organ and limb transplants
To help rats adopt transplanted limbs as their own, researchers have harnessed a ruse that cancer cells use to hide ...
Infographic: Where does the coronavirus fit in humanity’s long history of plagues and influenza pandemics?
Disease and illnesses have plagued humanity since the earliest days, our mortal flaw. However, it was not until the marked ...
Explaining consciousness: These 2 brain networks show how we turn experiences into memories
One of the most recent studies showed a clear relationship between two brain networks critical to consciousness. In a paper ...
CRISPR-based ‘PAC-MAN approach’ could be answer to COVID-19 and other viral menaces
Tim Abbott, a PhD candidate at Stanford University’s bioengineering department, checked the results of an experiment that he was running ...
Some countries have done a much better job fighting the coronavirus. Here’s what worked.
With Europe and the United States locked in deadly battle with the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, a number of countries ...
Coronavirus vaccine created with synthetic biology would be ‘more potent’ than flu shot
As companies hurry to test potential vaccines, the National Institute of Health (NIH) is hoping new bio-engineering techniques to help ...
Video: Here’s how quickly the coronavirus could overwhelm US hospitals
How bad will the coronavirus be for US hospitals? Some experts suggest that 20-60 percent of adults may contract the ...
No root cause: What if mental health symptoms are the actual disease?
“In the prevailing understanding of mental disorders, the premise is that an underlying cause exists,” says Sverre Urnes Johnson, associate ...
How did the coronavirus jump from bats to humans? Snakes, pangolins and turtles top suspect list
When a new zoonotic outbreak occurs, scientists rush to trace the species the infection originated from. Often the infection jumps ...
Here’s how long the coronavirus survives on common surfaces
A big question in the outbreak of Covid-19, which has already infected more than 110,000, is how the germ that ...
Travel restrictions to stop the coronavirus? Here’s why they won’t work.
Travel restrictions, though not recommended by the WHO, are a tool that countries use in hopes of stopping the spread of ...
Promising coronavirus treatment effort blocked by fetal tissue research ban
A senior scientist at a government biomedical research laboratory has been thwarted in his efforts to conduct experiments on possible ...
Infographic: US among world laggards in COVID-19 testing per capita, ranking 22
The available data shows that South Korea has done many more tests than other countries. This suggests that the number ...
‘The genie is out of the bottle’: How ‘mind reading’ will transform medical care
The ability to detect electrical activity in the brain through the scalp, and to control it, will soon transform medicine ...
Chance of extraterrestrial contact will multiply by 1,000 in coming decade, says SETI scientist
[H]owever small the probability of seeing a signal from E.T. is, those chances are soon going to be a lot ...
1918 Spanish flu redux? ‘Unprepared for the deluge of death’, politicians rejected ‘social distancing’ in bungled handling of the pandemic
It was a parade like none Philadelphia had ever seen.... When the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive parade stepped off on September ...
