Top 6 Four
The age of genetically-enhanced children is approaching. Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro imagines a have-and-have not future, and it’s not pleasant
Biotech interventions to help sick children—like gene therapy—are approached with supreme caution. If a treatment has a reasonable chance of ...
Natural GMOs: Plants and animals ‘steal genes’ from other species during process of evolution, mimicking transgenics
Little did biologist Gregor Mendel know that his experiments with sweet peas in a monastery garden in Brno, Czech Republic, would ...
Podcast: Should farmers embrace ‘natural’ organic chemicals to replace ‘synthetic’ inputs? Moving beyond the outdated debate
As the benefits of biotechnology come to fruition, people are letting go of the dated view that we should be ...
Viewpoint: Consumer-focused GM and gene-edited products throw anti-GMO movement’s future into doubt
The bizarre QAnon conspiracy theory that has swept the nation and embedded itself in our political discourse is a prime ...
Vasectomies are becoming a political statement
The fate of male reproductive organs is not a traditional concern in debates about the environment. But this is the ...
Part 2: Why is Africa the global COVID-19 ‘cold spot’? — The historical challenge of disentangling genes and environment
Does greater prior exposure to pathogens, including other recent coronaviruses, help explain why Africa is a COVID-19 cold spot, despite ...
Catching COVID from food: A year’s worth of research dispels panic
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, not much was known about SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus) and its survival in food, on various materials ...
Viewpoint: Female, younger, better-educated and affluent – How ‘alternative medicine’ has taken America by storm and endangered lives
I am a skeptic and a curmudgeon, so I was surprised when a friend of 30 years asked if she ...
‘New story unfolding’: Ancient finger bones found in Asia force a rethinking of human migration
Politics, geography, and tradition have long focused archaeological attention on the evolution of Homo sapiens in Europe and Africa. Now, ...
Viewpoint: Pesticides can be harmful—but they’re also ‘vital to human health and global food security’
As much as pesticides are a threat to certain ecosystems, they’re also responsible for providing the planet with food in ...
Podcast: Glyphosate boosts cancer risk 41%? How a questionable claim from a flawed study went viral
As a rule, scientific research is relegated to obscure technical journals and goes unnoticed by most people. Every few months, ...
There is a lot of misinformation about COVID, the available vaccines and their effectiveness. These 7 insights will help clear that up.
Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, there have been many thousands of articles and commentaries published on almost every ...
Marketers are beginning to use data mined from consumer DNA tests. Should we be worried?
A woman lingers at a display of coffeemakers. Soon after, images of the very same contraptions festoon her Facebook feed, ...
More or less deadly? Which way is SARS-CoV-2 evolving?
No lethal pandemic lasts forever. The 1918 flu, for example, crisscrossed the globe and claimed tens of millions of lives, ...
Viewpoint: Glyphosate-cancer trials illustrate how tort lawyers undermine science in the courtroom
Should we be fair to chemical manufacturers when they are sued? First of all, who are they? Since everything in ...
Viewpoint: Politics and science in Europe: How the development of COVID-19 vaccines highlights ideological inconsistency and hypocrisy
The announcement that Astra-Zeneca, a British-Swedish biopharmaceutical company, had developed the third coronavirus vaccine to show promise in Phase III ...
What did a teenage girl look like 9,000 years ago? Here is her face, reconstructed from bone fragments found in a cave in Greece
Swedish sculptor Oscar Nilsson reconstructed the face of an 18-year-old young woman, dubbed Avgi, whose 9,000-year-old bones were found in ...
Viewpoint: This is no time to cut corners on regulation of COVID-19 vaccines
With COVID-19 cases, the percentage of positive test results, and hospitalizations reaching record levels in much of the nation, the ...
Evolution’s ‘great leap forward’: When did humans cross the intelligence rubicon?
When did something like us first appear on the planet? It turns out there’s remarkably little agreement on this question ...
How immunotherapy is revolutionizing cancer care
More than a century ago, in 1910, President William Howard Taft made what then seemed a bold but reasonable prediction: ...
Final weeks to approval: NIH’s Anthony Fauci and FDA’s Peter Marks on what’s ahead before we can expect a safe COVID vaccine
As tens of thousands of people participate in phase 3 clinical trials on COVID-19 vaccine candidates, the focus is turning ...
New England Journal of Medicine sets aside 200 years of politics, editorializing FDA and CDC have been compromised, calling political leadership ‘dangerously incompetent’
Covid-19 has created a crisis throughout the world. This crisis has produced a test of leadership. With no good options ...
The Goldilocks phenomenon: Why as many as 45% of patients get COVID and show no symptoms
One of the reasons Covid-19 has spread so swiftly around the globe is that for the first days after infection, ...
Revisiting the Kon-Tiki hypothesis: Did ancient Americans really settle the Pacific?
An eccentric theory of human seagoing migration—made famous by one of the most insanely suicidal ‘scientific’ experiments ever undertaken—has recently ...
Why a coronavirus vaccine ‘October Surprise’ could be an October disaster
There is widespread anticipation of the availability of vaccines to prevent COVID-19 infections so that Americans can get their lives ...
The ‘Church of Nature’ and the sudden collapse of the cult of Extinction Rebellion
When a cult loses its grip on a person, a form of reawakening takes place. It involves having to return ...
Dissecting male-female brain and behavior differences
People have searched for sex differences in human brains since at least the 19th century, when scientist Samuel George Morton ...
