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.
Humans pushed Neanderthals to extinction, research suggests
Guilty as charged. Over the years, humans have often been accused of killing off our Neanderthal cousins, although climate change, stupidity and even bad ...
Black Plague modified human genes, no biotech needed
Evidence continues to build that at least part of our ancestors’ story is encoded in our DNA--and the information comes ...
Female athlete teaches herself genetics, cracks her own rare disease
Kim Goodsell was running along a mountain trail when her left ankle began turning inward, unbidden. A few weeks later ...
Does dyslexia come with some advantages?
Dyslexia is often called a “learning disability.” And it can indeed present learning challenges. Although its effects vary widely, children ...
Do epigenetics reports unfairly target mothers?
Epigenetics studies expand what scientists understand about human genetics. It's a very cool field. It's gathered some media attention, as ...
Genome sequencing promising for curing lupus, personalized medicine
Medical researchers have used DNA sequencing to identify a gene variant responsible for causing lupus in a young patient. The ...
Interplay of genes, gender, and environment crucial to developing addiction
Studies of substance abusers have long hinted that some people are at least partially genetically predisposed to addiction. This certainly ...
Diet wars: ‘Caveman diet’ is all the rage, but ignores what our ancient ancestors really ate
Before the advances that made agriculture possible, humans ate solely what they could hunt and gather, which varied wildly depending ...
I’m more afraid of my kids’ genomic data NOT being sequenced than how it might be misused
The era of precision genomics is upon us, and as with GMO foods, that scares some people. But not GLP ...
New horizons and future directions for epigenetics
Ever since the age of Darwin — and especially since the discovery of DNA — scientists have thought of biological inheritance ...
Stem cell dysfunction may be responsible in some cases of schizophrenia
A gene long associated with schizophrenia and subsequently studied in rodent brain has now been scrutinized in human neurons. These neurons, derived ...
Genetic explanation for short stature in humans
It's not another tall tale: Evolutionary biologists have developed a new understanding of the genetic basis of short stature in ...
Human and dogs’ relationship based on dominance hierarchy
For dog lovers, comparative psychologists Friederike Range and Zsófia Virányi have an unsettling conclusion. Many researchers think that as humans ...
Bold new directions for synthetic biology
Armed with powerful new genetic tools and a penchant for tinkering, synthetic biologists have built a new menagerie. Photographic “E. coliroid” ...
Fossils tell of mammals’ rough road to survival
When the asteroid slammed into prehistoric Mexico and drew the curtain on the Cretaceous, dinosaurs did not fare very well. All ...
Polio strain highlights importance of strengthening vaccine effectiveness
The cause of an unusually severe outbreak of poliomyelitis that hit Congo in 2010 has been identified: a strain of ...
How much can we actually tell from a genome scan?
On August 6, researchers announced in The New England Journal of Medicine that they had found that mutations in a ...
Researchers explore genetic complexities of sex determination
Men and women differ in plenty of obvious ways, and scientists have long known that genetic differences buried deep within ...
Biochip closely mimics biological cells
Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery, but mimicking the intricate networks and dynamic interactions that are inherent ...
23andMe moves to mend fences with FDA, seeks Bloom syndrome test approval
Seven months after the FDA forced 23andMe to stop reporting health results to its customers, the personal genomics company is ...
Genetic empowerment: Extreme athlete probes own genetics to streamline diagnosis
When extreme athlete Kim Goodsell discovered that she had two extremely rare but ostensibly unrelated genetic diseases, she taught herself ...
‘Subway’ map tracks journey of engineered stem cells
The differentiation of engineered stem cells may be imagined as a subway journey, where the genetic equivalents of missing a transfer or ...
Bacteria may be key to immunity, DNA manipulation
Bacteria’s ability to destroy viruses has long puzzled scientists, but researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health ...
IBM chip mimics brain, marks advancement in artificial intelligence
The human brain is the world's most sophisticated computer capable of learning new things on the fly, using very little ...
Can tobacco plant help cure Ebola?
It's an eye-catching angle in the story of an experimental treatment for Ebola: The drug comes from tobacco plants that ...
How data mining targets pregnant mothers
For me, like most potential parents, the first test I took was not genetic. Instead it was a simple pregnancy ...
Can identifying ‘suicide genes’ help predict risk?
No one could have predicted that Oscar-winning comedian Robin Williams would kill himself. Or could they? When someone commits suicide, ...
