Wired
As rising oceans encroach on arable land, gene editing, floating farms may help feed the world
A soil biologist and co-director of the University of Sheffield’s Institute for Sustainable Food, [Duncan] Cameron had long known that ...
Viewpoint: AI gets ‘B-minus at best’ for dealing with COVID-19. But better days are ahead
Truth be told, AI has not had a particularly successful four months in the battle of the pandemic. I would ...
Supercomputers take first steps toward replacing human clinical drug trials
We are seeing the beginnings of a profound paradigm shift in health technology. AI simulations have the potential to test ...
Viewpoint: Sweden’s unique approach to COVID-19 containment has failed
There was a familiar refrain from political commentators on certain corners of the internet in the early days of the ...
The human brain may not be such a great model for designing artificial intelligence
[M]ost artificial neural networks are decidedly un-brainlike, in part because they learn using mathematical tricks that would be difficult, if ...
Accidental side effect: COVID-19 pandemic could give polio ‘a fresh start’
The world’s total number of confirmed Covid-19 cases is closing in on 5 million. But an accidental side effect of ...
‘That’s not easy’: Figuring out who gets first shot at a coronavirus vaccine
Even if scientists do develop a safe, broadly effective vaccine, nobody knows how to give it to billions of people ...
How coronavirus wreaks havoc on the body, organ by organ
Covid-19 has confounded the expectations of doctors. Patients suffer from a bewildering variety of complications. They urinate blood, complain of ...
‘Skin hunger’: That burning desire for human contact supercharged by the coronavirus pandemic
Once a week, Alice, who lives alone, walks to the end of her garden to meet her best friend Lucy ...
‘Microbe maps’: Swabbing subways, ATMs and park benches to find coronavirus hot spots
Nearly a decade ago, after watching his young daughter lick a pole in a subway car, computational biologist Christopher Mason ...
Lessons learned from the past: Why rushing a coronavirus vaccine could be dangerous
Annual flu shots don’t need to go through clinical trials every time they are adjusted for each year’s flu strain, ...
Squids’ ability to edit their own RNA could lead to human disease treatments
For nearly every animal on Earth, any changes made to the DNA are transmitted from the cell nucleus by messenger ...
How GMO, gene-edited crops can help feed billions of people without fueling climate change
We face a formidable challenge in the years ahead. We need to reduce [carbon] emissions and also sustain a growing ...
Infographic: Fighting the coronavirus pandemic with collaborative science and data sharing
On February 27, a teenager in the Seattle area was diagnosed with Covid-19. Shortly after, researchers at the Seattle Flu Study shared genomic data ...
CRISPR-based ‘PAC-MAN approach’ could be answer to COVID-19 and other viral menaces
Tim Abbott, a PhD candidate at Stanford University’s bioengineering department, checked the results of an experiment that he was running ...
Predicting the next coronavirus outbreak by mining genetic databases
Search “coronavirus” on GenBank, a public repository for genomes, and today you’ll find more than 35,000 sequences. Alpaca coronaviruses. Hedgehog coronaviruses ...
Alzheimer’s research is stuck on a ‘single, unproven hypothesis’. It’s time to explore new theories
Over the past decade we’ve seen failure after failure in clinical trials for neurodegenerative disease. Despite over 200 clinical trials, ...
We’ve mapped a fly brain down ‘to the very last neuron’. That’s a big deal for human brain research
[A]s director of Janelia Research Campus, part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, [Gerry Rubin has] spent the last 12 ...
Terminally ill cancer patients donating their bodies for research on how tumors spread
It sounds macabre, but it’s important research. [Andrew] Rowan is one of a team of experts working on a new ...
3D-printed plastic bunny contains its own blueprint coded in synthetic DNA
The kumquat-sized bunny, cute as it may be, isn’t a toy or a good luck charm. But if you cut ...
How well-intentioned research into ‘gay genes’ spawned controversial DNA screening app
A giant collection of carefully cataloged genomes, called the UK Biobank, was about to become available to researchers. … To [researcher ...
Artificial Intelligence lab OpenAI wants to develop technology ‘to save the world’. Will it also assist the US military?
Microsoft’s recent victory in landing a $10 billion Pentagon cloud-computing contract called JEDI could make life more complicated for one of the ...
Extraterrestrial babies? Scientists want to know how microgravity would affect human reproduction
The plane’s rapid descent created a microgravity environment in the cockpit and for a few seconds, [pilot Daniel] González felt ...
We need pollinators to grow food in space, but bees may not survive harsh extraterrestrial environment, study shows
One of the world’s newest space analogs is inside a white ziggurat on top of a former nuclear bunker in ...
Controversy over gene-edited cow’s ‘surprise DNA’ could slow efforts to promote animal welfare
On the morning of August 7, Alison Van Eenennaam awoke to a tweet from a man she had never met ...
Brain scans, like DNA, can say a lot about who you are. That creates ethical, privacy concerns.
Many people are aware—and properly protective—of the vast stores of information contained in their DNA. When DNA samples were collected ...
This ‘psychedelic’ treatment can cure opioid addition. It also might kill you
With proper treatment, withdrawing from opioids won’t kill you, but it can make you want to die. … The desperation ...
Viewpoint: Processed food does not necessarily mean it’s unhealthy—the science behind an essential but misunderstood technology
You are you and I am me because of processed foods, because our ancestors learned how to cook meat and make bread and, perhaps ...
