Top 6
Biopharming can help pioneer new treatments but cumbersome, outdated regulations block innovation
Obtaining medicines from plants is not new. Aspirin was first isolated from the bark of the willow tree in the ...
Plant microbiomes: Humans are not the only organisms that need healthy biomes. Here is how to grow safer and more nutritious food and feed
A “physical examination” is the standard way to track human health. It involves a variety of measurements such as blood ...
Is biology sexist and racist? The escalating battle over ‘inclusive terminology’ and the language of science
Science, biology in particular, is rife with racism and other egregious forms of prejudice and bigotry. That’s the belief now ...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to detect crop diseases are on the way
Swarms of locusts devastating crops in East Africa, corn rootworms wreaking havoc in the Midwestern US. Blights destroying rubber trees in Brazil and ravaging potatoes in South India ...
Did Neanderthals’ meat-eating habits contribute to their demise?
Understanding our ancestors’ diets may reveal critical clues about their evolutionary success or failure ...
Viewpoint: GMO crops are key to sustainable farming — why are some scientists afraid to talk about them?
A shallow piece in the journal Science downplaying the importance of GMO crops belongs in a New Age publication ...
Viewpoint: Modern humanity is only 300,000 years along. Does that explain why we screw up so much?
How can humans have gotten so far, but still have so many problems? We are a young species. We are ...
“GMOs”, “contamination” and “coexistence”: Challenging the misuse of concepts and wrongheaded regulation of agriculture and food
The term “genetically modified organisms” (or “GMOs”) has come into wide use over the past two decades although it is ...
Kill the Messenger: mRNA-based livestock vaccines are under attack by vaccine skeptics. Here’s why their rejectionism is misplaced — and dangerous
The rapid development of safe and effective vaccines against SARS-CoV2 demonstrated the agility and efficacy of mRNA vaccines. The knowledge ...
Viewpoint: Existential ethics — Pondering the extinction of the global human population
Why would it be so bad if our species came to an end? It is a question that reveals our ...
Here’s how the GMO purple tomato soon to be in US grocery stores came to fruition
Norfolk Healthy Produce’s purple tomato first appeared in The New York Times Magazine eight months ago. Genetically engineered to naturally produce ...
Agriculture and climate change: Taking the best of all farming systems could tip the carbon scale in the right direction
Agriculture contributes a significant portion of the world's climate-changing greenhouse gases. In turn, changes in climate will reduce agricultural yields ...
Why did Ellie in the Last of Us not succumb to Cordy, the zombie virus? Stem cells might explain it, and that could yield real-life vaccines
It’s unsettling to watch The Last of Us, in which parasitic fungi turn humanity into flesh-eating zombies, just as the ...
Why the European Union needs to grow genetically-engineered crops
The United States, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Israel, Japan, and India are among the growing number of countries that have deregulated ...
Faith genes? Can DNA predispose us to religion and spirituality?
Do our genes predispose us to follow a religion? I searched Google Scholar for reports on the inheritance of religiosity ...
Viewpoint: Biotechnology rejectionists claim the Green Revolution caused more harm than good. Here are the facts.
After the Second World War, regional famines began to occur. Believing that increasing agricultural performance can be the solution to ...
CRISPR gene doping: The next ‘big issue’ in world athletics
In 2020, the Polish developer CD Projekt Red launched Cyberpunk 2077, a video game that pulled players in to a ...
Top 10 anti-biotech propagandizers: Who are the science deniers and snake oil peddlers undermining science in agriculture and medicine?
Anti-science beliefs are proliferating, particularly on the biotechnology and genetics front, covering a range of issues from vaccine denialism to ...
French Academy of Agriculture scientist challenges government to ‘follow the science’ and revise its regulatory opposition to genetically edited crops
While a debate is in progress at the European level about the genetically edited products, it is time for the ...
Sweet genes: Why so many people are ‘practically programmed’ to love sugar
The sweetness of sugar is one of life’s great pleasures. People’s love for sweet is so visceral, food companies lure ...
Not out of the woods on COVID threats: Animal reservoirs of SARS-CoV-2 pose unknown risks to humans
The COVID-19 pandemic has been one of the most devastating events in public health in the U.S. over the last ...
Viewpoint: Why health care based on race is so problematic
Choosing a medical treatment based on patient traits historically used to define races is fundamentally flawed, because race in the ...
Genomic scars: How centuries of surviving antisemitism has shaped Jewish genetics
Between election news and the ever-earlier encroachment of Christmas, an important November anniversary of a horrific event goes mostly unnoticed: ...
Viewpoint: ‘Only 60 harvests remaining on Earth’? Environmentalist exaggerations obscure dramatic advances in biotechnology-boosted agriculture
A little over 200 years ago, one of the noted economists and philosophers of the day, Thomas Malthus published an essay ...
Rethinking humanity’s origin story: Did all modern humans evolve from East Africa?
New evidence is prompting researchers to rethink Homo sapiens’ origin story—and what it means to be human ...
De-extinction: The Second Coming
Ten years ago it burst into mainstream popular life: the possibility of resurrecting extinct species ...
Honeybee health: Driving problem is not climate or pesticides but the deadly Varroa mite
Some food grown in the US, especially high-cost luxuries like almonds, are pollinated using bees. Since bees are most often ...
