Nature
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Engineered tomatoes kill whiteflies by ‘silencing’ gene that protects them from pesticides
A pernicious agricultural pest owes some of its success to a gene pilfered from its plant host millions of years ...
Thanks to gene editing, another biotech-driven farming revolution might be ‘just around the corner’
The basic principle of crop breeding is to first discover and then select for variants with desired traits. While selection ...
First lab-grown chicken nuggets just hit restaurants in Singapore, and more ‘slaughter-free’ meats could arrive in 2021
The company behind [an in vitro cultured] poultry product, Eat Just, has since sold more than 200 servings of the ...
Nature editorial: Post-Brexit, the UK should embrace gene editing in food and agriculture while taking safety concerns seriously
[B]ecause of Brexit, [the UK] has an opportunity to diverge from EU [agricultural] regulations. In a consultation that [ended] on ...
Infographic: Is COVID here to stay? Why the virus may never be eradicated
Nature asked more than 100 immunologists, infectious-disease researchers and virologists working on the coronavirus whether it could be eradicated. Almost ...
Global food system responsible for 34% of greenhouse gas emissions, study finds
We have developed a new global food emissions database (EDGAR-FOOD) estimating greenhouse gas (GHG; CO2, CH4, N2O, fluorinated gases) emissions ...
Viewpoint: 20 years into the human genome revolution, how can we make genomics more accessible and transparent?
[20 years after the Human Genome Project,] many of the ethical, legal and social implications of genome research — including ...
Optimizing vaccine rollout: Should we be concerned about taking possibly less effective — but easier to distribute — COVID shots like AstraZeneca’s and J&J’s?
Yusuff Adebayo Adebisi knows that a vaccine that offers 70% protection against COVID-19 could be a valuable tool against the ...
CRISPR ‘mini-brains’ made from Neanderthal DNA offer insight into the evolution of human cognition
Humans are more closely related to Neanderthals and Denisovans than to any living primate, and some 40% of the Neanderthal ...
Could Ethiopia make or break the future of GM crops in Africa?
I have followed with interest the recent controversy around plantings of transgenic crops in Ethiopia. Until 2015, the country took ...
Psychedelics are revolutionizing psychiatry. Here’s what we can expect
Once dismissed as the dangerous dalliances of the counterculture, [psychedelic drugs] are gaining mainstream acceptance. Several states and cities in ...
GM, insect-resistant Bt rice unlikely to pose a health risk, study shows
Rice is considered one of the most important staple food crops. Genetically modified (GM) Bt rice [harboring the] cry1Ab gene ...
Crash effort to develop coronavirus vaccines has revolutionized disease treatment
The COVID-19 experience will almost certainly change the future of vaccine science, says Dan Barouch, director of the Center for ...
New COVID variants raise spectre of a global health catastrophe. Will they outpace vaccine development?
Scientists want to understand why SARS-CoV-2 variants identified in the United Kingdom and South Africa seem to be spreading so ...
How infectious are asymptomatic COVID carriers?
[E]vidence suggests that about one in five infected people will experience no symptoms, and they will transmit the virus to ...
Facial recognition is growing with COVID – and sparking a burgeoning resistance movement
Facial-recognition technology (FRT) has long been in use at airport borders and on smartphones, and as a tool to help ...
Infographic: When extremely premature babies grow up, they face chronic conditions that researchers are just beginning to understand
For the first time, researchers can start to understand the long-term consequences of being born so early. Results are pouring ...
Infographic: How AI facial-recognition research can be misused to target minorities
[A] study, published in 2018, had trained algorithms to distinguish faces of Uyghur people, a predominantly Muslim minority ethnic group ...
Possibility of life on Venus fades after reanalysis of atmospheric data
In September, an international team of astronomers made headlines when it reported finding phosphine — a potential marker of life ...
WHO launches daunting task of tracing COVID’s global path
The search will start in Wuhan — the Chinese city where the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was first identified — and ...
Why COVID death counts are not rising as quickly as confirmed cases
Charlotte Summers, an intensive-care physician at the University of Cambridge, UK, says that data collected by the country’s National Health ...
CRISPR-edited bananas immune to killer pathogens advance toward commercialization in Africa
For more than two decades, I have been working to improve several staple food crops in Africa, including bananas, plantains, ...
Can lab-grown brains become conscious?
In August 2019, [biologist Alysson] Muotri’s group published a paper in Cell Stem Cell reporting the creation of human brain ...
Viewpoint: ‘Untold human death and suffering’: What could be the impact of the Trump administration plan to reach herd immunity
“Surrendering to the virus” is not a defensible plan, says Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute in ...
Hardware modeled on the brain could revolutionize computing
A challenge for researchers developing applications of neuromorphic [or human brain-inspired] hardware is that a formal hierarchy such as Turing ...
Face masks—Are they critical or ideology-driven overkill? Here’s the science
Face masks are the ubiquitous symbol of a pandemic that has sickened 35 million people and killed more than 1 ...
Ending hunger: Researchers are giving smallholder farmers the wrong advice, study claims
How can research help to end hunger? One way to answer this question is to assess published research on hunger, ...
Can we use DNA to sketch the faces of criminals?
Most labs studying DNA phenotyping look for relationships between changes to individual letters of a person’s genetic code, known as ...
