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.
Skipping the shingles vaccine can be deadly: Infection may also speed biological aging
In recent years, increasing numbers of studies have shown that the shingles vaccine appears to be capable of protecting the ...
Trump’s first-term surgeon general joins effort to block current nominee, Casey Means
At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams stood with President Donald Trump at the White ...
Plastic Detox documentary claims the microplastic in your brain can make a spoon. The latest science says that’s ridiculous
Last year, we wrote about how a decimal-point error and selective framing turned black plastic spatulas into a public-health scare ...
How AI is supercharging Russia’s social media disinformation campaigns
"What we're seeing is not just a spike in deepfakes but a shift in how influence is produced," said Chris ...
Viewpoint: Radical leftist makes the case for blocking nuclear energy
It’s been 15 years since Fukushima’s reactors experienced those meltdowns and we still don’t fully understand their long-term repercussions. Nuclear ...
Nuclear energy renaissance? Hangover from decades of misinformation and stagnation in the West over nuclear while China powers forward
Nuclear power is winning support from tech companies, utilities and governments seeking carbon-free, round-the-clock energy to fuel an artificial intelligence ...
Key Republicans are abandoning Casey Means’ floundering surgeon general nomination
The nascent Make America Healthy Again movement got one of its biggest wins last spring: Casey Means was selected to be the ...
Viewpoint: RFK Jr.’s war on the CDC may be too extreme even for Trump
... Acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya said something that no other prominent health leader in the Trump administration has. “I ...
Trump administration resorts to censorship to counter what it claims is rampant censorship by European governments
In early 2025, aides to Vice President JD Vance ordered a small office at the State Department to document how ...
Protection, Kansas was the first U.S. town to be fully vaccinated in 1957. Now the state is a hotbed of RFK, Jr.’s vaccine rejectionism movement
Kansas was once home to the first town in the entire country to be fully vaccinated against polio. In 1957, ...
How fake AI satellite imagery is impacting Iran war coverage
An unprecedented wave of AI-generated misinformation about the US-Israel war with Iran is being monetised by online creators with growing ...
RFK Jr.’s vaccine panel member quits in anger after judge says he’s not qualified
Dr. Robert Malone, vice chair of the federal committee that recommends vaccines to Americans, angrily resigned his position on Tuesday ...
Viewpoint: Off-shore wind advocates face uphill battle challenging Trump’s war on sustainable energy
... Trump has declared that the US will see “no new windmills,” the type of comment that many in the ...
How to “vaccinate” against mis- and disinformation
As part of BBC Media Action’s broader effort to understand what works in tackling information disorder, we’re testing proactive responses to ...
As teen suicides pile up, AI companies squirm to avert accountability
It was Amaurie’s younger sister who discovered the body. She was also the one who was looking through her brother’s ...
Viewpoint: The Trump-RFK, Jr. anti-vaccine circus has yet another act, and it’s getting worse
Three weeks ago in a CIDRAP Op-Ed, I argued that the reconstituted Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) was preparing to ...
Viewpoint: ‘Structural racism’ isn’t a myth and it can kill you
Across countries and decades, evidence links discriminatory housing, education, and health systems to higher mortality, greater disease burden, and poorer ...
Viewpoint: Climate change propaganda and disinformation are now the official position of the U.S. government
The Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists recently won a court case against the administration which forced it to ...
Viewpoint—Tech pseudoscience: The limits of AI and machine learning
Machine Learning (ML) is a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI), where a neural network is ‘trained’ to recognise patterns, in order ...
The most developed countries have declining birth rates, endangering their economies—or maybe not
Low fertility rates—the average number of children born to a woman—may not spell economic trouble after all, scientists say. In ...
40% of American adults have confidence in RFK Jr.’s leadership on health, and the numbers are sinking
Americans are losing confidence in the nation’s public health agencies, according to a survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center ...
The Trump administration pledged to speed approval of rare disease drugs. The reality is the opposite
Rare disease breaks the traditional math of drug development. Companies can’t run a 10,000-patient trial when only a few thousand ...
Viewpoint: How ‘fake news’ shapes our behavior?
In recent years, the spread of fake news—particularly in the health domain—has become a significant concern. Misinformation about medical treatments, vaccines, ...
Viewpoint: ‘The battle to feed humanity is over”: Eco-pessimist Paul Ehrlich leaves a legacy of misinformation about the mortal threat of overpopulation
The butterfly biologist turned rock-star eco-pessimist, Paul Ehrlich has died at the age of 93. That in itself is remarkable ...
As vaccine disinformation sweeps the country, pediatricians struggle to respond
Across the country, clinicians like Dr. [Alissa] Parker, who also holds a doctorate in nursing practice, are contending with a ...
Supreme Court likely to have final say on RFK, Jr.’s currently-blocked vaccine policy
Although a federal judge in Boston has temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s changes to the US childhood immunization schedule, the ...
Pentagon nears use of untested AI in life-and-death war targeting decisions
The US military might use generative AI systems to rank lists of targets and make recommendations—which would be vetted by ...
