Scientific American
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 ...
Innovation bottlenecks: Human ‘challenge studies’ that purposefully expose subjects to a virus key to developing effective vaccines and minimizing health and financial risks
The most common bottlenecks in vaccine development are cost, risk, safety and time. A vaccine may show promise in a ...
Genetically modified mosquitoes are now hatching in the Florida Keys. Scientists and residents concerned about Zika and other viral diseases couldn’t be more pleased. Here’s why
[M]osquito eggs placed in the Florida Keys are expected to hatch tens of thousands of genetically modified mosquitoes, a result ...
Why do some people cheat? The science of infidelity
There are many reasons why people cheat, and the patterns are more complex than common stereotypes suggest. A fascinating new ...
3-D technology is reinventing paleoanthropology and the reconstruction of fossils
In 2018 a student excavator, Samantha Good, came upon the adult male skull of a Paranthropus robustus, lying upside down, ...
Personalized medicine: ‘Race’ matters when it comes to genetic diseases and hard-wired drug responses
Although race is a social rather than biological construct, there are inherited genetic variations that play a role in drug ...
Viewpoint: Human genetics has a racist history. Here is what needs to be done to clean up the mess
Combined with Mendelian determinism, which was wildly popular in the U.S. in the early 20th century, [eugenicist and father of ...
Does estrogen deficiency really exist?
The big problem with estrogen deficiency as a symptom or diagnosis is that it is a catchall term that plays ...
Viewpoint: Why the effort to find a ‘biological basis’ for being transgender is misguided and unhelpful
The search for a biological cause of transness—also known as “biological essentialism”—may be well-intentioned, but it is a dangerous path ...
AI emulates trained dogs’ ability to detect cancer and other diseases, including COVID-19
Humans already employ [dogs’] olfactory acuity for contraband and explosives detection. More recently it has also proved uncannily good at ...
Bionic eyes: Generating visual perceptions and hope for those who cannot see
In the 1970s, [biomedical engineer William] Dobelle had shown that electrically stimulating visual brain areas (the visual cortex) caused people ...
The downside of ‘improving’ humanity: How CRISPR could edit out ‘abnormal genes’ — and human diversity
CRISPR has many functions; one of these is that it can be used to treat disease. Yet the far-reaching, more ...
Is the US underestimating COVID reinfection risks?
As millions of Americans struggle to recover from covid and millions more scramble for the protection offered by vaccines, U.S ...
‘GUYnecology’ and ‘Phallacy’: Two new books take on the ups and downs of male appendages
It can stretch up to nine times your body length (if you’re a barnacle); be a detachable tentacle covered in ...
