Pressure is growing on direct-to-consumer genealogy and genetic testing companies to be more transparent about their privacy policies, after the arrest of the notorious Golden State Killer using publicly available data from one of the websites. In a letter sent this week — and shared with STAT — Reps. Dave Loebsack of...

Every patient is unique, and the art of medicine is the component of the practice that addresses such uniqueness with compassion and care. Will artificial intelligence (AI) change all of that? … Artificial intelligence ... involves data analytics coupled with the ability to predict outcomes and decision-making capabilities for the...

Once upon a time, shortly after the age of bloodletting, people thought that facts could change minds. It may seem laughable now, but many used to believe they could simply provide evidence that fire is hot, that the Earth is round, or that humans are causing climate change, and others...

Members of the House Appropriations Committee are threatening to withhold funding for the International Agency for Cancer Research (IARC), whose methods have been under fire recently not only from Congress, but also in the courts. IARC is a member of the World Health Organization, which receives some funding from U.S....

[One] DNA test found that my family’s dog, Teddy, is part pit bull, which comes as no surprise. Many rescue pooches have pit bull roots. The test also says Teddy is to a great extent of Saint Bernard stock, which maybe you can see if you really squint, but which,...

[There is one form of] special pleading that is gaining some currency, and that’s basically carving out an exception to the requirement for rigorous science for “traditional medicine,” be it Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), aboriginal medicine, or folk medicine practiced around the world. … This is the basic narrative...

One of the great purported boons of GMOs is that they allow farmers to use fewer pesticides, some of which are known to be harmful to humans or other species. Bt corn, cotton, and soybeans have been engineered to express insect-killing proteins from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, and they have indeed been successful...

Input-intensive crop monocultures and industrial-scale feedlots must be consigned to the past in order to put global food systems onto sustainable footing, according to the world’s foremost experts on food security, agro-ecosystems and nutrition. The solution is to diversify agriculture and reorient it around ecological practices, whether the starting point...

The savannah scrubland where Chief João Ponce once hunted deer and wild boar in Brazil has given way to neat rows of soy and corn that a tractor sprays with herbicide. In the next field, silver grain silos shimmer in the hot sun. Ponce is head of the Uirapuru indigenous...

Earlier this year, [Boston Dynamics founder Marc] Raibert said the company planned to start selling its SpotMini robot dogs in 2019, and onstage this week, he said the company plans to produce about 100 of the robots by the end of this year. The goal is to begin mass production at the...