Atlantic
Genetically engineered monkeys? China is using them for autism research
[MIT genetics researcher Guoping] Feng now travels to China several times a year, because there, he can pursue research he ...
Did our ancestors’ development of complex tools spur the growth of language?
[A] new body of research [is] arguing that if not for our hominin ancestors’ hard-earned ability to produce complex tools, ...
CRISPR innovator Feng Zhang on treating human diseases: ‘We’re still a ways from that’
[Biologist Feng Zhang] has already made two discoveries tipped to win Nobel Prizes. The big one, the one that shot ...
Viewpoint: 3 reasons we should be concerned about artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence will in time bring extraordinary benefits to medical science, clean-energy provision, environmental issues, and many other areas. But precisely ...
Small genealogy website GEDmatch ‘never expected’ its criminal-catching use
Ever since investigators revealed that a genealogy website led police to arrest a man as California’s notorious Golden State Killer, interest ...
How did our brains get so big?
By studying [brain organoids, researcher Frank] Jacobs could look for genes that are switched on more strongly in the growing ...
Viewpoint: Genetic intelligence tests are ‘worse than just wrong’
On a recent visit to [genetic data website] DNA.Land, I scanned down the list of traits they offered to tell ...
Sleeping helps us find ‘out of the box’ solutions to difficult problems
[M]any experiments have shown that sleep promotes creative problem-solving. Now, Penny Lewis from Cardiff University and two of her colleagues have collated and ...
As precision medicine explodes, there aren’t enough genetic counselors to go around
[When Nancy] Wurtzel stared at the blue glow of her computer screen announcing she had two copies of the ApoE4 ...
The future of ‘genetic genealogy’ crime solving
Just three weeks ago, law enforcement in California announced the arrest of the Golden State Killer using DNA. … On ...
After 25 years, will Congress revive NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)?
Lawmakers in the House of Representatives recently proposed legislation for NASA’s future that includes some intriguing language. The space agency, the bill recommends, ...
Are we done bleeding horseshoe crabs for pharmaceutical use?
Contemporary humans do not deliberately kill the horseshoe crabs—as did previous centuries of farmers catching them for fertilizer or fishermen ...
Our bodies churn out trillions of mutations each day—why aren’t we ‘walking bags of cancer’?
As you read this article, the cells in your body are dividing and the DNA in them is being copied, ...
Death of controversial biohacker Aaron Traywick puts movement at ‘crossroads’
At just 28, [Aaron] Traywick was among the most infamous figures in the world of biohacking—the grandiose CEO of a ...
Is it time to discuss what we should or shouldn’t do with ‘lab-grown blobs of human brain tissue’?
Rusty Gage and colleagues at the Salk Institute [recently] announced that they had successfully transplanted lab-grown blobs of human brain tissue ...
Why your startle reflex is like an ‘exploitable data breach’
[T]he startle reflex might be an evolutionary point of origin for many of our most common human emotional expressions. When ...
Could humans be Earth’s second civilization?
“How do you know we’re the only time there’s been a civilization on our own planet?” [said Goddard Institute for ...
Biohacking can work wonders on machines, but on humans? Not so much.
We can hack our technologies, and even our societies, so why not ourselves? Alas, things are not so straightforward. While ...
All yeast strains likely descended from common ancestor in China
When scientists in France set out to sequence 1,000 yeast genomes, they looked at strains from all the places you ...
Delving into the minds of psychopaths
It’s a rare person who goes out of their way to spend time with psychopaths, and a rarer one still ...
What the humble fruit fly has taught us about human genetics
I came to First in Fly, a new book about fruit-fly research, with perhaps some special interest. In fact, a popular ...
‘White-hat hacker’ Columbia University geneticist Yaniv Erlich maps his 13-million-person family tree
Yaniv Erlich has been a white-hat hacker and a geneticist at Columbia University, and now he works for a genealogy company. This unusual ...
Video: Josiah Zayner’s deep dive into DIY biohacking
In 2016, Josiah Zayner, a former synthetic biology research scientist at NASA, checked himself into a hotel room. Over the ...
Ginkgo Bioworks’ mission to make GMOs fun, cool and socially conscious
Out on an old Navy dry dock, a biotech company called Ginkgo Bioworks is growing genetically modified organisms by the ...
Forecasting the flu is a challenge. Here’s why
[F]or the third week in a row, flu activity remains widespread in 49 states, according to the latest CDC data ...
Personalized piglets could offer insights into disease progression in children
To better understand [incurable inherited disease neurofibromatosis type 1, Charles] Konsitzke learned, you need a species that’s closer in both ...
Uptown rats? Rodents in New York City have genetically adapted to different neighborhoods
As a whole, Manhattan’s rats are genetically most similar to those from Western Europe, especially Great Britain and France. They ...
Proof the yeti exists? DNA analysis shows bone ‘samples’ came from bears
In the fall of 2013, Charlotte Lindqvist got a call from a film company making an Animal Planet documentary about ...
