Wired
Tempering optimism: Here’s why the trajectory of COVID’s third wave will be so hard to predict
On June 24, the number of daily infections in the UK crossed 16,000, levels not seen since early February when ...
Why the UK’s announced embrace of CRISPR gene editing food revolution likely won’t go as smoothly as hoped
“Let's start now to liberate the UK's extraordinary bioscience sector from anti-genetic modification rules, and let's develop the blight-resistant crops ...
Search for the perfect cell-donor cow: Why cultured lab-grown beef is the future of sustainable meat
At a glance, the formula for cultured – or lab-grown – meat is simple. Take some animal cells, feed them ...
Arabic language anti-vaccine conspiracy theories feature Bill Gates as the central target
Across dozens of Arabic pages and groups, dangerous conspiracy theories about the pandemic are racking up millions of views and ...
Scientific conundrum solved? Dairy-free cheese that mimics the real thing in development
“Coming at it from a scientific perspective, you can't help but realise that there's no magic in cows or in ...
This cold war neurosurgeon successfully transplanted monkey heads. Could it work on humans?
Robert White [was] a neurosurgeon who spent decades performing head transplants on monkeys, hoping to eventually use the procedure to ...
Lab-grown tuna could satisfy growing demand for fish without the severe environmental impact
From 1961 to 2015, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, global fish consumption grew from 9kg to 20.2kg ...
Jennifer Doudna on how CRISPR is moving out of the lab to transform medicine and revolutionize disease treatments
In 2021, we will see increased use of CRISPR-Cas enzymes to underpin a new generation of cost-effective, individualised therapies. With ...
Virus wars: The evolutionary battle between humans and COVID-19
The past (horrible, tragic, no-good, very bad) year might have seemed like a straightforward battle between scientists and a virus ...
Viewpoint: Let them eat cheese: Evidence shows this ‘guilty pleasure’ doesn’t deserve its unhealthy reputation
A large body of research suggests that cheese’s reputation as a fattening, heart-imperiling food is undeserved. When it comes to ...
Growing food in space may offer sustainability benefits beyond genetically engineering plants on Earth
Sending fancy French grapes into orbit might sound like an expensive PR stunt. There is, after all, a long history ...
Lab-grown wood: Could scientists make better trees than nature?
Wood and other plant-based materials may be renewable resources, but obtaining usable forms typically requires lots of transportation, milling, and ...
5 ways CRISPR has begun changing the world
[W]hile thousands of life scientists pivoted to trying to understand how the novel coronavirus wreaks havoc on the human body, and others transformed their ...
Reopening cold cases: The new tools revolutionizing DNA crime detection
Puzzle solvers by nature, genealogists tie the loose ends of a person’s familial tapestry for answers… It’s an emerging practice ...
‘Circular economy’: Turning waste into reusable products makes food and energy production more sustainable
We need to find a way to reduce waste, and the answer could be moving to a circular economy, which ...
FDA mulling approval of a device that monitors brains using electrodes threaded through veins and plugged into a computer
For decades, technologists have been trying to get brains to interface with computer keyboards or robot arms, to get meat ...
Viewpoint: Great Barrington Declaration on herd immunity falsely suggests a scientific divide over if we can achieve it and how
[The Great Barrington Declaration] suggests that scientists fall into two camps: those who are pro-lockdown and those who think we ...
How accurate are the ‘ethnicity estimates’ claimed by DNA genealogy companies?
Since 2012, more than 18 million people have mailed their spit-filled vials to [Ancestry DNA], which analyzes the genetic material ...
DNA testing reveals buried family secrets
[T]echnology has a way of creating new consequences for old decisions. Today, some 30 million people have taken consumer DNA ...
Bill Gates: ‘The majority of all US COVID-19 tests are completely garbage’
An early Cassandra who warned of our lack of preparedness for a global pandemic, [Bill Gates] became one of the most credible ...
A Study Finds Sex Differences in the Brain. Does It Matter?
[July 20, Armin Raznahan] and his team published a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that not only reported reliable sex ...
With a boost from COVID-19, the ‘Neobiological Revolution’ is transforming humanity
In the 1990s, the digital revolution came along and transformed, well, pretty much everything, from the way we communicate with ...
The human protein that might explain who’s most at risk from Covid-19
The earliest clinical data out of China showed that some [COVID-19 patients] consistently fared worse than others, notably men, the ...
Race science? Can AI ‘predict’ criminality through facial analysis?
With “80 percent accuracy and with no racial bias,” the paper, A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using ...
On the front lines fighting the coronavirus: I took a COVID-19 contact tracing course
In the Before Times, there were only about 2,200 contact tracers for the whole US, according to the Association of ...
Viewpoint: AI gets ‘B-minus at best’ for dealing with COVID-19. But better days are ahead
Truth be told, AI has not had a particularly successful four months in the battle of the pandemic. I would ...
Supercomputers take first steps toward replacing human clinical drug trials
We are seeing the beginnings of a profound paradigm shift in health technology. AI simulations have the potential to test ...
