Scientific American
Infographic: Autoimmune diseases — 76 identified so far — tend to target women over men. Here is a master list
There are many autoimmune diseases, and taken together they affect as much as 4.5 percent of the world’s population. This ...
There are still no approved and effective therapies for thousands of ‘long haul’ COVID patients
[A] study, published in February in the journal JAMA Network Open by researchers at the University of Washington, suggests that around ...
Automaticity: Why the health benefits of mindfulness are limited and why mindlessness is sometimes better
Although mindfulness has its merits, psychological research has also revealed that in some circumstances it’s important to be mindless. That ...
Solving the problem of death: 150 seems to be an outer age limit, and here’s why
In Silicon Valley, immortality is sometimes elevated to the status of a corporeal goal. Plenty of big names in big ...
The scientific rationale for agnosticism
There is such a thing as being too picky, especially when it comes to things like work, love and nourishment ...
Brain Computer Interface: How BCI implants can transform thoughts into spoken words
More than 15 years ago, a man who was only 20 years old had a massive stroke when a major ...
‘Eyes are a window to the brain?’ Pupil size emerges as a marker of intelligence
Our pupils respond to more than just the light. They indicate arousal, interest or mental exhaustion. Pupil dilation is even ...
Fact check: Breakthrough infections from Delta or other COVID variants does not mean vaccines don’t work
Endless news cycles and viral social media warn of “breakthrough infections” in people already vaccinated for COVID-19. These reports leave ...
Synthetic biology in space: Mushrooms could be used to build extraterrestrial habitats
In a new “astromycological” venture launched in conjunction with NASA, [Paul] Stamets and various research teams are studying how fungi ...
Preventing the next virus outbreak: Making vaccine development and production a global mission
How do we prevent a pandemic like this from happening again? ... [We need] the ability to rapidly develop and ...
Separating hype from reality in the coming era of gene-enhanced ‘designer babies’
[W]hat new iteration of genetic testing could tempt healthy, fertile couples to reject our traditional time-tested and wildly popular process ...
The world of ‘designer DNA’ meets the challenge of intractable genetic disorders. Here’s how that story may play out
[T]he cutting-edge world of innovative genomic therapies is once again in the midst of explosive change—and designer DNA lies at ...
Video: Curious about the full implications of the CRISPR gene editing revolution? Here’s a primer
With CRISPR, a group of enzymes recognize certain repeats, and break the DNA there to insert important information in the ...
Viewpoint: Anti-biotechnology activists harshly criticize Gates Foundation funding of African agricultural initiatives
Africans have long been told that our agriculture is backward and should be abandoned for a 21st-century version of the ...
Why humans evolved to be the thirstiest of all mammals
To understand how water has influenced the course of human evolution, we need to page back to a pivotal chapter ...
Viewpoint: Concerned about biodiversity but wary of biotechnology innovation to achieve it? Your fears are misplaced
Some individuals worry about the unintended consequences of intervening with nature, including the use of genetic technology as well as ...
Meet the early twentieth century doctor who changed his gender and saved the lives of countless patients
When [physician Allan Hart, born Alberta] Lucille Hart grew old enough to learn about her father’s death, she would comfort ...
What do infectious disease experts say about the Wuhan lab leak COVID origins hypothesis?
So what do infectious disease researchers and evolutionary biologists say about [arguments for the Wuhan lab leak COVID hypothesis?] Is ...
Decades-past DDT exposure shown to ‘haunt’ our bodies for three generations or more
Friends and family often ask Barbara Cohn, an epidemiologist at Oakland's Public Health Institute, why she studies the effects of ...
Our DNA can store a staggering amount of information in an almost inconceivably small volume
The prevailing long-term cold-storage method, which dates from the 1950s, writes data to pizza-sized reels of magnetic tape. By comparison, ...
Viewpoint: ‘A toxic soup of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides is wreaking havoc’ on soil in farms around the world
Like citizens of an underground city that never sleeps, tens of thousands of subterranean species of invertebrates, nematodes, bacteria and ...
COVID side-effect: Many of us are more interested in brand names of companies that make our medications. Here’s why that could be a good development
In a new survey, my company, M Booth Health, found that a seismic shift has already begun. People are changing ...
COVID is outsmarting our immune systems — and it’s rendering essential monoclonal antibody treatments less effective
The use of monoclonal antibodies for the treatment of COVID gained national and international attention last October, when President Trump ...
Do people with artificial limbs come to see their prostheses as a natural part of the body — or just a tool?
[How do] humans’ wealth of sensory inputs—including the touch and visual perception involved in manipulating a tool—modify the sense of ...
Is the clock ticking for the human race?
At a recent lecture to Harvard alumni I was asked how long I expect our technological civilization to survive. My ...
Were self awareness and the ability to plan what set us apart from Neanderthals?
We bear a trace of Neandertal legacy in our genome, a bequest from ancestral interbreeding. But some experts argue that, ...
Are trees social beings? They exchange nutrients, help one another, and communicate about pests and other environmental threats
Previous ecologists had focused on what happens aboveground, but [Suzanne] Simard used radioactive isotopes of carbon to trace how trees ...
