nature
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, ...
Podcast: GM salmon coming soon? Food ingredients you can’t pronounce are safe; Monsanto patent lawsuit myths
Monsanto never sued farmers because their fields were accidentally contaminated with the company's GM seed. AquaBounty's genetically engineered AquAdvantage salmon ...
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 ...
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 ...
Asians and Blacks dramatically under-represented in medical research, distorting drug therapy effectiveness
A 2018 analysis of studies looking for genetic variants associated with disease found that under-representation [of minorities] persists: 78% of ...
How animals think
Neuroscientists wanting to understand the brain’s coding language have conventionally studied how its networks of cells respond to sensory information ...
Why is it so difficult to battle antibiotic resistance?
Before COVID-19, antibiotic resistance was estimated to kill at least 700,000 people each year worldwide. That number could now climb ...
Older coronavirus victims 350 percent likelier to experience symptoms than 10-19 year olds
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown a markedly low proportion of cases among children. Age disparities in observed cases could be ...
When CRISPR gene editing falls short: ‘Base editing’ might treat disorders on the maternal line in mitochondrial DNA
[A] technique — which builds on a super-precise version of gene editing called base editing — could allow researchers to ...
Viewpoint: Activist opposition to GMOs fueled by an ‘extremist’ vision of nature
We would like to take the opportunity on #Worldenvironmentday to come back to a problem we have been thinking about ...
Viewpoint: Anti-GMO groups push ‘natural’ COVID cures, deny pandemic-fighting biotech solutions
One of the primary arguments hurled at proponents of genetic engineering is that the crops, medicines and vaccines produced using ...
Infographic: Animal origins or lab leak? Tracing coronavirus back to the source
Since the pandemic began, the question of where the coronavirus came from has been one of the biggest puzzles. It ...
Video: Unnatural is better—How technology keeps us healthier and living longer
American Council on Science and Health microbiologist Alex Berezow takes on one of the most pervasive myths on social media ...
Infographic: 8 ways we can defeat the coronavirus
More than 90 vaccines are being developed against SARS-CoV-2 by research teams in companies and universities across the world. Researchers ...
Genetic analysis unravels East Asia’s history, highlighting migration of early farmers
Ancient genomics is starting to unravel the history of East Asia. The first large-scale studies of ancient human genomes from ...
Anti-vaccine online movement targeting undecided groups in social media, spreading disinformation about safety and coronavirus containment efforts, study warns
As scientists work to create a vaccine against COVID-19, a small but fervent anti-vaccination movement is marshalling against it. Campaigners ...
‘A radical idea’: Could a single factor be responsible for all mental illnesses?
What are the roots of mental illness? In the hope of finding an answer, scientists have piled up an enormous ...
Why isn’t there an ‘accelerated pathway’ for approving treatments during a pandemic?
Commercial biopharmaceutical discovery is a less than ideal vehicle for responding to an outbreak of a new viral pathogen spreading ...
Searching for coronavirus ‘antidote’ in the blood of former patients
Hospitals in New York City are gearing up to use the blood of people who have recovered from COVID-19 as ...
Viewpoint: To protect genetic privacy, it’s ‘crucial’ that we develop an international code of conduct
Genomics researchers worldwide are increasingly dealing with vast data sets gathered by consortia spanning many countries. Most are unclear on ...
‘Excitement is finally catching on’: Why RNA editing may be more promising than CRISPR
CRISPR editing — at least as a therapeutic technique in people — has turned out to be more difficult than ...
