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.
Forgotten by science: Four decades ago, medical researchers launched studies on rural Colombian families with fatal Huntington’s disease. They are just now following up
Huntington’s is a hereditary neurodegenerative disease caused by excess repetitions of three building blocks of DNA ...
Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain implant approved for human trials by the FDA
Elon Musk's brain-implant company Neuralink said May 25 that it got approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to ...
Humanity originally evolved in Africa — but new evidence shows we came from two distinct groups of hominids
A new fascinating study reveals humans were living in different regions of Africa, migrating from one region to another and ...
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey joins vaccine-rejecting crusade, shares video from Democratic presidential candidate and anti-vax activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Jack Dorsey, the head of Block Inc. and a co-founder of Twitter, posted two videos [recently] featuring presidential candidate Robert ...
How gene therapy could eventually snip out diseases in the womb
Recent advances in lab animals may bring medicine closer to achieving it—but this field is still in its infancy ...
AI helps discover new drug that kills antibiotic-resistant ‘superbugs’
Scientists have used artificial intelligence (AI) to discover a new antibiotic that can kill a deadly species of superbug ...
Mind-reading brain implants: 40-year-old paralyzed man can now walk, climb stairs and more
A 40-year-old man whose legs are paralyzed is able to climb stairs, move over ramps and switch from standing to ...
Memory loss as you age? Multi-vitamin supplements show modest benefits
Older adults who took a multivitamin each day for three years found a mild improvement in their memory after one ...
Battle between Meta’s open-source AI and proprietary ChatGPT and Google systems heats up
As a race to lead A.I. heats up across Silicon Valley, Meta is standing out from its rivals by taking a different ...
Microsoft claims that its AI has achieved human reasoning skills. Critics say those scientists are kidding themselves
A provocative paper from researchers at Microsoft claims A.I. technology shows the ability to understand the way people do ...
10% of the human genome is made up of viruses. Here’s how they helped shape our species’ evolution
Devastating pandemics, viruses have also played an important role in human evolution – and without them you wouldn't be here ...
What, me worry? The era of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is rapidly approaching — when ‘fake people’ will outthink humans
Technologists warn about the dangers of the so-called singularity. But can anything actually be done to prevent it? ...
Blood dinner: Why are you targeted by mosquitoes but some lucky few are spared?
Researchers built the ‘world’s largest perfumery for mosquitoes’ to test why some people get eaten alive while others do not ...
Would you donate some of your eggs to a stranger if it means you could freeze and keep half of them — for free?
Freeze-and-share models have a different method of attracting clients compared to traditional egg donation programs ...
Viewpoint: ‘AI could upend war, cyber conflicts — and in the most extreme case — the use of nuclear weapons.’ What might happen if the military embraces artificial intelligence tools?
U.S. national security officials are warning about the potential for the new technology to upend war, cyber conflict ...
Intergalactic travel: If we want to explore deep space, humans will have to ‘hibernate like bears’
Scientists said that human beings need to learn how to shut our bodies down like hibernating bears if we ever ...
Here’s how CRISPR gene editing is already revolutionizing medicine
A number of genetic disorders are caused by a mutation in a single gene. The power (and precision) of CRISPR ...
Chimpanzee ‘language’ deciphered by scientists
Scientists have moved one step closer to decoding the languages that animals like chimpanzees use to communicate ...
Earliest human footprints ever discovered trace back 300,000 years to first human species to live in cold weather and build shelters: Homo heidelbergensis
Archaeologists connect world's oldest footprints to humans: Scientists believe these footprints helped depict the ecological makeup of the area at ...
Fear of unintended consequences slows adoption of embryo gene editing
As gene-editing technology advances, we take a look at how debate about its application has evolved in recent years, and ...
What kick-started the evolution of our complex human brains?
A chance rearrangement of the human genome over a million years ago probably kick-started the evolution of modern humans from ...
Marijuana and psychosis: Cannabis use linked to 30% of diagnoses in young men
A huge Danish study shows that up to 30 percent of psychosis diagnoses in young men could have been prevented ...
Neanderthal links: Here’s how nose shape evolved in modern humans
Humans inherited genetic material from Neanderthals that affects the shape of our noses, finds a new study led by UCL ...
Viewpoint: Trump of the left? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. traffics in vaccine misinformation, much like the hard right
It doesn’t surprise me at all that a Trumpian candidate would emerge inside the Democratic Party, someone trying to run ...
Got the marijuana munchies? Innovative worm study may help solve the mystery
University of Oregon neuroscientist and professor Shawn Lockery recently published a paper on the impacts of cannabis on worms ...
Psychological differences between women and men are often the largest in gender egalitarian cultures. Why?
Psychological differences between women and men are often the largest in cultures that are the most gender egalitarian ...
Prehistoric jewelry: Scientists pull 20,000-year-old human DNA from necklace made from deer teeth using new extraction technique
The innovative method for obtaining genetic material allows us to link archaeological artifacts with the people who touched them ...
