Scientific American
Beyond the binary: Science suggests there’s more than just male or female
Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence ...
Keeping artificial intelligence free of intentional bias
The conversation about unconscious bias in artificial intelligence often focuses on algorithms that unintentionally cause disproportionate harm to entire swaths ...
Promising treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy developed with CRISPR gene editing
Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a life-threatening muscle-wasting illness. Occurring mostly in males, it is the most common type of muscular ...
Can exercise lead to new treatments for Alzheimer’s?
For the 50 million individuals worldwide ailing from Alzheimer’s disease, the announcements by pharmaceutical giants earlier this year that they will end ...
Exploring color blindness through human retinas grown in lab
A paper published October 11 in Science uses a retina grown outside the body to show how cones develop into the eyes’ color sensors ...
Cracking the code for facial recognition
Brain-imaging studies have revealed that several blueberry-size regions in the temporal lobe—the area under the temple—specialize in responding to faces ...
Seeking a simple blood test to detect deadly preeclampsia disorder earlier in pregnancy
When Leigh Ann Torres was in her 29th week of pregnancy, she experienced a sudden, 14-pound weight gain along with terrible swelling ...
Growing mini ‘brains’ from skin cells offers promise for personalized medicine
Imagine the following transformation. A pea-sized chunk of your skin breaks apart in a dish of salts and serums. The ...
Seeking to expand the role of ‘electroceutical’ therapies
Electroceuticals—devices that treat ailments with electrical impulses—have a long history in medicine. Think pacemakers for the heart, cochlear implants for ...
‘Risky decisions’ and why our brains make it so easy for us to gamble
A new study by a team from Johns Hopkins University appears to have identified a region of the brain that plays a ...
Can we grow clothing textiles from living organisms?
[A] small but growing group of innovators is turning to the genius of nature in an attempt to put wastefulness ...
Transforming treatment of diabetes with insulin-producing cellular implants
Many people with diabetes prick their fingers several times a day to measure blood sugar levels and decide on the ...
‘Fight or flight’: Body’s natural stress response linked to depression, diabetes and heart disease
[Our] so-called “fight-or-flight” response served our ancestors well, but its continual activation in our modern-day lives comes with a cost ...
Are digital gadgets hurting our brains?
Ten years ago technology writer Nicholas Carr published an article in the Atlantic entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He strongly suspected ...
Proxima Centauri b: Why Earth’s cosmic neighbor could be suitable for life
Ever since the discovery of the exoplanet—known as Proxima Centauri b—in 2016, people have wondered whether it could be capable of ...
New opioid promises ‘gold standard’ pain relief without the addiction
Opioid drugs like morphine and Oxycontin are still held as the gold standard when it comes to relieving pain. But ...
Searching for alien life: Why we shouldn’t ignore low-oxygen ‘dead planets’
Until recently, little was known about oxygen’s abundance in the atmosphere [when] microbes were the only life on the planet ...
Why curing the common cold is so difficult
The hunt for a cure for the common cold began in the 1950s, shortly after scientists discovered the primary group ...
She’s blind, but sees movement. Woman’s condition may help us understand brain’s inner workings
Milena Canning can see steam rising from a coffee cup but not the cup. She can see her daughter’s ponytail ...
Repairing paralysis? ‘Growth cocktail’ shows promise for severed nerves
[R]esearchers have coaxed nerve cells to span the divide of a complete spinal cord injury. Their findings, described August 29 in Nature, ...
Here’s one of the reasons obese people have trouble losing weight
Obesity rates in the U.S. and abroad have soared: The world now has more overweight people than those who weigh ...
In the search for aliens, we need ‘a robust definition’ of life
Even though we still struggle with finding a satisfactory definition of life, that doesn’t mean that we can’t think about ways that ...
‘Remarkable’ love child: Here’s what happened when a Neanderthal met a Denisovan
In a remarkable twist in the story line of early human evolution, scientists have announced the discovery of “Denisova 11”—a ...
Study shows link between autism and widely banned pesticide DDT
Mothers with high levels of the pesticide DDT in their blood during pregnancy are more likely to bear children who ...
Searching for the origins of the ‘dark traits’ of humanity
We all know people who consistently display ethically, morally, and socially questionable behavior in everyday life. Personality psychologists refer to ...
Could studying rare Parkinson’s mutation help treat other cases?
A handful of gene mutations are linked to inherited PD, but they account for less than 15 percent of the ...
Game changer for cystic fibrosis? Discovery of new cell could alter quest for treatment
The discovery of a new type of cell could fundamentally alter how cystic fibrosis researchers seek a cure for the ...
