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.
Next-gen medicine: Navigating use of DNA data while preserving genetic privacy
Genomic medicine holds the promise of tailoring medical treatments to an individual’s unique genetic profile, enhancing the effectiveness of treatments, ...
Viewpoint: Antidepressants and obesity medications work — but we don’t know why. Here’s why that’s a problem
We like to think we understand the drugs we take, especially after rigorous trials have proved their efficacy and safety ...
Latest conspiracy theory claims that COVID is ‘bacterial pneumonia’: Here’s how this antivax delusion gained a foothold
To antivaccine conspiracy theorists, it is always of the utmost importance to find a way to explain deaths from the ...
Interactive AI: What’s next after ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence chatbots?
DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman wants to build a chatbot that does a whole lot more than chat. In a recent ...
‘We’re reaching a significant inflection point in gene and cell therapy’: What’s the future for these exorbitantly expensive new drugs?
Get ready for a world of million-dollar drugs. Pricey gene therapies that could cure devastating genetic disorders in one fell ...
Oldest known wooden structure: Unearthed 480,000-year-old interlocking logs found in Zambia suggest early hominids had advanced technical skills
Modified logs dating to about 476,000 years ago might be the oldest evidence of wooden structures, a new study finds ...
Menstruation and evolution: The history of humanity has side-lined the role of women
A page-turning whistle-stop tour of mammalian development that begins in the Jurassic Era, “Eve” recasts the traditional story of evolutionary ...
Viewpoint: ‘AI has gone from a precocious toddler to blowing through barriers separating human and machine capabilities’. Is it time to worry?
Imagine if your brain got 10 times smarter every year over the past decade, and you were on pace for ...
Genes and sexuality: Could epigenetics help us understand the mystery of sexual orientation?
Reports of genes that “cause” human homosexuality (and many other human behaviours) have failed to stand up to scrutiny – ...
Are ‘forgotten’ memories lost forever?
Forgetting is a fact of life—one that many people find frustrating. But mounting evidence pushes back at the notion that ...
Improving humanity through technology? How transhumanism is rerouting the course of human evolution
Improving humanity through technology? This is one of the ideas behind transhumanism, a cultural and ideological movement that advocates perfecting ...
DNA arms race? How and why China is collecting genetic data from millions of people around the world
Most of Europe was in lockdown in April 2020 when a plane arrived in the Serbian capital bearing a well-timed ...
Viewpoint — Convergence of AI and the blockchain: A new phase of human evolution or humanity’s downfall?
In a thought-provoking essay, blockchain pioneer Trent McConaghy argues that artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain are destined to converge, enabling ...
Viewpoint: Medical, financial and ethical hurdles block humanity’s dream to settle space
Companies such as United Launch Alliance and Lockheed Martin are designing infrastructure for lunar habitation. Elon Musk has claimed SpaceX will ...
Race and health: One gene variant carried mostly by people with African ancestry quadruples risk of Parkinson’s disease
A global effort to make genetic studies more diverse has led to a discovery about Parkinson's disease, a common brain ...
Obesity drugs Ozempic and Wegovy are upending the health care system. Should we be concerned?
Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly are about to start raking in tens of billions of dollars a year on their new obesity drugs, ...
Did COVID vaccine mandates reduce infection rates among college students?
New research from The Ohio State University College of Medicine finds COVID-19 vaccine mandates are highly effective at reducing the ...
Wild elephants were domesticated — but not by humans. Here’s the surprising mystery of how that happened
An international team of researchers recently pointed out that similar features exist within populations of elephants, prompting the question of ...
Can AI chatbots ‘feel’?
Generative AI has made giant strides toward machine intelligence. Can machine consciousness be far behind? ...
Elon Musk says no monkeys died after Neuralink implant tests — but new information suggests a dozen monkeys were euthanized
Fresh allegations of potential securities fraud have been leveled at Elon Musk over statements he recently made regarding the deaths ...
There are now more than 1 million donor-conceived children in the US. That’s creating inequities in egg freezing and donor brokering
There is significant reproductive injustice and lack of access to fertility treatments by diverse populations. Nowhere is this more obvious ...
Video: How animals are rapidly evolving to keep up with the world humanity is destroying
Evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton says nature is rapidly changing to keep up with the world humanity has built ...
Viewpoint: US museums, universities and federal agencies still possess the remains of over 100,000 Indigenous Americans. It’s time to give them back
Museums, universities and federal agencies still possess the remains of 110,000 Native Americans, Native Hawaiians and Alaska Natives ...
What makes an embryo an embryo? Synthetic fertilized eggs scramble conventional science
The mainstreaming of IVF, or in vitro fertilization, has familiarized new generations of people with what the earliest stages of ...
What time of day is best to exercise if you want to lose weight—and why?
If your main fitness goal is weight loss, you may want to consider the time of day you’re exercising, a ...
‘You feel like you’re out in the wilderness’: Here are the leading theories for why long COVID is so disabling
For people suffering from long COVID's often disabling symptoms, including intense fatigue, breathing troubles, cognitive issues and heart palpitations, the ...
Human kidneys grown in pig embryos? Xenotransplantation strides into the future
Scientists introduced human stem cells into pig embryos engineered to lack a kidney, stem cells then differentiated and grew into ...
