Large-scale solution to climate change? Living Carbon plants first genetically modified trees in US forest

Large-scale solution to climate change? Living Carbon plants first genetically modified trees in US forest

Gabriel Popkin | New York Times | 
Living Carbon’s poplars start their lives in a lab in Hayward, Calif. There, biologists tinker with how the trees conduct ...
Viewpoint: Capitalism and technology: Whose interests will AI serve — and why that question raises unrecognized dangers about how your data will be used

Viewpoint: Capitalism and technology — Whose interests does AI serve, and what unrecognized dangers about data privacy are around the corner?

Ezra Klein | New York Times | 
A.I. researchers obsess over the question of “alignment.” How do we get machine learning algorithms to do what we want ...
Climate change ripple effect: Rising temperatures allow mosquitoes to spread across Africa, bringing malaria with them

Climate change ripple effect: Rising temperatures allow mosquitoes to spread across Africa, bringing malaria with them

Apoorva Mandavilli | New York Times | 
Mosquitoes that transmit malaria have moved away from the Equator by about three miles per year over the past century, ...
$1 million+ gene therapies offer salvation for many sufferers but pose financial challenges for government-paid health care systems

Million-dollar gene therapies offer salvation for many patients but pose financial challenges for government-funded health care systems

A wave of transformative but hugely expensive treatments is challenging the budgets of health systems in wealthy nations. Now countries ...
Menopause: Here’s an updated primer

Hormone therapy for menopause: Here’s an updated primer

Marta Blue | New York Times | 
The biggest takeaway from the last two decades of research is that age matters: For women who go through early ...
Viewpoint: 'Going organic isn't cheap' — What does it cost farmers to switch from conventional farming to organic?

Viewpoint: ‘Going organic isn’t cheap’ — What does it cost farmers to switch from conventional farming to organic?

Peter Coy | New York Times | 
Farmland has to stop using industrial-strength pesticides and fertilizers on land for three years before it can meet the U.S ...
Challenging the belief that 'eating soy-based foods can increase the risk of breast cancer' and 9 other nutrition myths

Challenging the belief that ‘eating soy-based foods can increase the risk of breast cancer’ and 9 other nutrition myths

Sophie Egan | New York Times | 
Some false ideas about nutrition seem to linger in American culture like a terrible song stuck in your head. So ...
Will an HIV vaccine ever be developed? Failure of Janssen Pharmaceuticals’ global testing raises doubts

Will an HIV vaccine ever be developed? Failure of Janssen Pharmaceuticals’ global testing raises doubts

Apoorva Mandavilli | New York Times | 
The only vaccine against H.I.V. still being tested in late-stage clinical trials has proved ineffective, its manufacturer announced on [January ...
Brain implants have begun to restore functions, but advances are slow

Brain implants help many paralyzed people move again — but progress is slow

Cade Metz, Christina Jewett | New York Times | 
Brain implants have begun to restore functions, but advances are slow. But achieving full-body restoration of movement, as Elon Musk ...
Viewpoint: 7.4 quadrillion calorie shortfall by 2050 — Why we need to eat less meat and stop wasting food

Viewpoint: 7.4 quadrillion calorie shortfall by 2050 — Why we need to eat less meat and stop wasting food

Michael Grunwald | New York Times | 
If we are serious about cleaning up the mess we’re making for less influential species, there are four things individuals ...
Post-Roe debate: New York Times addresses ‘when human life begins’

Post-Roe debate: New York Times addresses ‘when human life begins’

Elizabeth Dias | New York Times | 
In the months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it has become unavoidable, as activists and politicians try to ...
CRISPR

CRISPR gene editing could help cure as many as 7,000 diseases. What’s holding things up?

Fyodor Urnov | New York Times | 
The parents of a 2-year-old girl write that their daughter “could die within the next year” because a genetic mutation ...
Minding the climate: How studying the brain can help us solve the world's environmental crisis

Minding the climate: How studying the brain can help us solve the world’s environmental crisis

Somini Sengupta | New York Times | 
Dr. Ann-Christine Duhaime is a pediatric neurosurgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital. She looks at brains. Over the course of ...
are ants or humans the superior species

Ants: The world’s most successful species?

Farhad Manjoo | New York Times | 
Given their centrality to life on the planet, not to mention their teeming populations, shouldn’t we think more highly of ...
Do trees ‘talk’ to each other through their roots? It’s become a highly-contested belief

Do trees ‘talk’ to each other through their roots? It’s become a highly-contested belief

Gabriel Popkin | New York Times | 
Few recent scientific discoveries have captured the public’s imagination quite like the wood-wide web — a wispy network of fungal ...
COVID experiments on mice

COVID research transparency: Lab loopholes can lead to unnecessarily risky experiments. What can be done?

Benjamin Mueller, Carl Zimmer | New York Times | 
Scientists at Boston University came under fire this week for an experiment in which they tinkered with the Covid virus ...
The Song of the Cell: Oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee’s new book explains the mystery of how the body’s smallest unit affects everything from IVF to COVID

The Song of the Cell: Oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee’s new book explains the mystery of how the body’s smallest unit affects everything from IVF to COVID

Jennifer Szalai | New York Times | 
“The Song of the Cell,” the latest work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning oncologist, recounts our evolving understanding of the body’s ...
prospective cancer vaccine

A cancer vaccine to protect healthy but high risk people? Researchers ‘brimming with optimism’ in preventative shot

Gina Kolata | New York Times | 
It seems like an almost impossible dream — a cancer vaccine that would protect healthy people at high risk of ...
Future fruit: Meet the farmers painstakingly developing colorful and tastier new apple varieties

Future fruit: Meet the farmers painstakingly developing colorful and tastier new apple varieties

Elizabeth Landau | New York Times | 
Imagine reaching up to a tree branch and plucking an apple that’s unusually tall and narrow — a variety called ...
The anti-vax movement of Marin County may be coming to a close

How the coronavirus pandemic flipped uber-liberal Marin County from vaccine rejectionist hub to shaming COVID vaccine skeptics

Soumya Karlamangla | New York Times | 
In the pandemic age, getting a Covid-19 shot has become the defining “vax” or “anti-vax” litmus test, and on that ...
Attempts at saving the Northern White Rhino from extinction through assisted reproduction.

Viewpoint: Bringing back extinct animals — Can breakthroughs in gene editing technology offset humanity’s dicey environmental stewardship track record?

Tim McDonnell | New York Times | 
Today, the only surviving members of the white rhino species are two females at a conservancy in Kenya, Najin and ...
Can exercise reduce dementia risk?

Can exercise reduce dementia risk?

Rachel Fairbank | New York Times | 
Experts had long believed that exercise could help protect against developing dementia. However, though they had observed a general pattern ...
'Superspreader': New York Times documentary investigates natural products peddler and vaccine rejectionist Dr. Joseph Mercola

‘Superspreader’: New York Times documentary investigates natural products peddler and vaccine rejectionist Dr. Joseph Mercola

Sarah Long credits the information she found on Mercola.com with potentially saving her life. For years, she had health issues ...
Doggy dementia: Here’s what you need to know to protect your pet

Doggy dementia: Here’s what you need to know to protect your pet

Jan Hoffman | New York Times | 
A large new study of 15,019 dogs enrolled in the Dog Aging Project, an ongoing investigation into canine illness and ...
'I found my people': The path some parents travel to become anti-vaxxers

‘I found my people’: The path some parents travel to become anti-vaxxers

Sheera Frenkel | New York Times | 
They waved signs that read “Defeat the mandates” and “No vaccines.” They chanted “Protect our kids” and “Our kids, our ...
‘Without major changes to agriculture, government targets for mitigating climate change are at risk’, scientists warn

‘Without major changes to agriculture, government targets for mitigating climate change are at risk’, scientists warn

For decades, scientists have pursued a tantalizing possibility for bolstering food supplies and easing hunger for the world’s poorest: improving ...
Just 10 years after its invention, CRISPR gene editing is taught in high schools

Just 10 years after its invention, CRISPR gene editing is taught in high schools

Eleanor Lutz | New York Times | 
A decade after CRISPR started to become a major tool in genetic research, a new generation of scientists is growing up with the ...
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