Science Literacy Project Daily Digest
Smart, sustainable, scalable: AI, hydroponics and the future of farming
As global population pressures rise and arable land continues to shrink, the urgency to revolutionize agriculture is more pronounced than ...
CRISPR opens the door toward treating common health threats like rising cholesterol
A CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing therapy has halved people’s cholesterol levels in a small clinical trial — raising hopes that, with further study, gene editing could ...
The fear that AI machines will soon be smarter than humans is just another conspiracy theory
Every age has its believers, people with an unshakeable faith that something huge is about to happen—a before and an ...
Agriculture faces a challenging future as it enters the age of gene editing and sustainable farming
In the ever-evolving world of agricultural science, researchers are relentlessly searching for innovative methods to enhance crop resilience against the ...
Is animal testing still necessary? Will it be phased out?
[The] UK’s science minister announced an ambitious plan: to phase out animal testing. ... The news follows similar moves by ...
Viewpoint: Sobering and scary—An inside report on the growing size and influence of the anti-vaccine movement
From wellness influencers worried about Wi-Fi to crypto enthusiasts trading peer-to-peer coins, the CHD [Children's Health Defense] conference offered something ...
Viewpoint: Jane Goodall was duped by anti-crop biotechnology conspiracy junk science
Jane Goodall is well-deserving of the many laudatory obituaries recently published. But there is one disturbing twist in the great ...
Kiss and tell: The 21 million-year-old history of smooching
Humans do it, monkeys do it, even polar bears do it. And now researchers have reconstructed the evolutionary origins of ...
Viewpoint: We need a coordinated global effort to counteract climate change’s impact on food production
Last May, the Japanese Minister of Agriculture resigned after commenting that he never bought rice because his supporters gave it ...
Viewpoint: The Washington Post’s ignorant article suggesting corn country deaths are driven by the herbicide glyphosate
Several weeks ago, the Washington Post ran an article titled “The mysterious rise of cancer among adults in the Corn Belt.” It ...
Will the regenerative agriculture movement be hijacked away from farmers by ‘big corporations and hungry start-ups’?
In farming today, it sometimes feels as though whatever the problem, whether it’s soil health, yields, carbon or profitability, the ...
A third start-up joins the race to create ethically-acceptable CRISPR babies
A West Coast biotech entrepreneur says he’s secured $30 million to form a public-benefit company to study how to safely ...
Rewriting the human code of life: Will we be able to afford the medical advances that gene editing and AI are fast making possible?
We are now in the second great wave of the genetic revolution, not defined by reading the human code of ...
Can culture evolve through natural selection?
For well over a century, Darwin’s theory of natural selection has served as biology’s grand unifying framework, explaining how species ...
It would be incredible if we could breed plants that pests couldn’t gorge on. CRISPR is making it a reality
Insects that feed on starch can find veritable feasts in corn, pea, and bean crops or warehouses. It is no ...
AI-designed viruses raise fears over creating life
A group of Stanford University scientists posted a paper online in mid-September, describing a feat that could have been plucked from the ...
Sustainable farming: How can we engineer crops to adapt to drought and other effects of a warming climate?
As Earth's climate warms and changes, sustainable agricultural practices are critical for feeding a rapidly growing population. A roadmap for how new ...
Are chatbots sophisticated enough to debunk conspiracy theories?
Many people believe that you can’t talk conspiracists out of their beliefs. But that’s not necessarily true. It turns out ...
As the U.S. reverses its support for climate change solutions, China’s dominance as the renewable energy superpower spreads to the developing world
As the United States torpedoes climate action and Europe struggles to realize its green ambitions, a surprising shift is taking ...
Were dodo birds really dodo-heads? Rescuing the reputation of an undeservedly smeared species
Until the last decade or so, the dodo was depicted as a comically chubby, clumsy cretin, too complacent and trusting ...
Viewpoint: Science is a corporate conspiracy: The consequences of the alliance between RFK, Jr., his MAHA acolytes, and science-distorting enviro activists
A National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences paper is sounding the alarm about detectable per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in ...
Biotechnology’s role in combating global food waste
A stark and heart-wrenching paradox haunts our modern world: while nearly one-tenth of humanity goes to bed hungry, a tidal ...
Hitler’s DNA: Peaking into the Fuhrer’s brain—and pants
[A] Hitler male-line relative’s swab collected ... yielded a perfect Y-chromosome match. Whether they got the relative’s permission to use his ...
Will we ever have a sex robot?
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, is trying to walk a fine line. On the one hand, he thinks that ...
Health Canada opens grocery stores to cloned animal foods. Is the nation ready?
According to Health Canada’s own consultation documents, Ottawa intends to remove foods derived from cloned animals from its “novel foods” ...
Viewpoint: Wall Street Journal calls out Trump’s FDA for foot-dragging on approvals for breakthrough drugs
Our editorials criticizing the Food and Drug Administration for torpedoing promising treatments must be hitting an intracranial nerve. Proof of ...
Conspiracy peddlers have been around for centuries. What’s behind their recent surge in popularity?
QAnon’s mutation from a conspiracy theory on an internet message board into a movement with the characteristics of a cult ...
