Atlantic
Here’s a virus that CRISPR can’t touch—it could help researchers gain better control of the gene-editing tool
Bacteria and phages are likely locked in an arms race. The former evolve new kinds of scissor enzymes, and the ...
Tracing evolution of mammalian hearing: Essential ear bones were once part of the jaw
One hundred and twenty million years ago, when northeastern China was a series of lakes and erupting volcanoes, there lived ...
Chronic pain relief: Why Gabapentin may not be a ‘safe’ alternative to opioids
Gabapentin was supposed to be the answer. Chronic pain afflicts about a fifth of American adults, and for years, doctors thought it ...
Why do women make up two-thirds of Alzheimer’s patients? The answer may be found in menopause
Two-thirds of all Alzheimer’s patients are women. Why? It has often been posited that this is because women live longer ...
How a genetically modified morning glory was almost the 2020 Olympics mascot
Sebastian Cocioba, a 29-year-old college dropout and self-styled “plant hacker,” has lived there with his parents for the past decade ...
Keto diet as a cancer treatment? Researchers explore potential to treat diseases, seizures
[S]cientists have known for decades that the keto diet can prevent epileptic seizures even when pharmaceutical treatments have failed. But ...
‘Superhero therapy’: How comic book characters can help us navigate life
Why adults flock to this kind of therapy speaks volumes about the importance of superhero stories—and the nature of the ...
Could common infections be causing eating disorders?
Infections might, in fact, spark eating disorders in some people. For the study, Lauren Breithaupt, a clinical psychologist at Massachusetts ...
Anonymous no more: AncestryDNA test reveals identity of woman’s stem cell donor
In 2017, Holly Becker took an AncestryDNA test, and the results, she would only later learn, exactly matched those of ...
‘Utterly magical’: This ‘two-step dance’ may explain the origins of life
Go back far enough in time, before animals and plants and even bacteria existed, and you’d find that the precursor ...
Can we cure baldness with stem cell-based ‘hair farms’?
The physiology of balding has long vexed even the most entrepreneurial of scientists. Despite a rare confluence of commercial forces ...
10 years ago, the Human Brain Project promised to simulate a human brain. What went wrong?
On July 22, 2009, the neuroscientist Henry Markram walked onstage at the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, England, and told the ...
Can’t lose weight? You may be able to blame this ‘cruel’ metabolic mechanism
In a study of former contestants on a season of the weight-loss reality show The Biggest Loser, scientists found that ...
Acne’s Wonder Drug Is a Mental-Health Puzzle
In 2002, a family filed a lawsuit alleging that an acne drug made their teenage son suicidal. Accutane, a since-discontinued ...
Why is it so difficult to figure out if coffee, wine, eggs and other foods are good for us or not?
Do you know whether eggs are good for you? What about coffee, red wine, or chocolate? Most people probably have ...
Video: Cryogenics could help people ‘cheat death’. But will those bodies ever be thawed?
Until the day he died, in 2011, Robert Ettinger hoped humanity would figure out a way to cheat death. Today, ...
FDA regulatory dilemma: Are fecal transplants drugs, human tissue, or something new?
For the past several years, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been trying to figure out how to regulate ...
Is it time for us to stop obsessing over extending the human life span?
In 2019, more people than ever before get to see their grandkids grow up. They get to enjoy a lengthy ...
How consumer genetic testing is ending paternal secrecy—for better or worse
When Nara Milanich wrote Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father—a history of the scientific, legal, and social conceptions of ...
Women are more likely to get autoimmune diseases. Is the placenta to blame?
In the United States alone, women represent 80 percent of all cases of autoimmune disease. ... Some scientists now think ...
Legalizing pot won’t slow the opioid epidemic, study suggests
Nearly five years ago, a team of researchers performing a study on medical cannabis came to a startling conclusion: The ...
Harnessing biological clocks to boost fight against disease, parasites
[Evolutionary parasitologist Sarah] Reece and other scientists are exploring an idea that is making waves in biology: If the body ...
‘Illogical and inappropriate’: How anti-vaxxers use 23andMe genetic tests to avoid vaccines
San Francisco’s city attorney subpoenaed a doctor accused of giving illegal medical exemptions from vaccination, based on “two 30-minute visits ...
How the right diet could slow cancer growth through ‘metabolic therapy’
Doctors are starting to think more about specific nutrients that feed tumor cells. That is, how what we eat affects ...
This funny-looking helmet could treat depression by ‘rewiring’ the brain
[Recent] weeks have been frenetic for Bre Hushaw, who is now known to millions of people as the girl in ...
‘Stranger than doctors could have imagined’: Boy born without one type of brain cells
Even before he was born, it was clear that the boy’s brain was unusual—so much so that his expecting parents ...
‘Evolution in action’: How did this common gut bacteria turn lethal?
For three decades, the deadly bacteria sat in cold storage. Normally, Enterococcus faecalis lives harmlessly in the human gut. One particular strain, ...