Wired
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 ...
Yes, male and female brains are structured differently
[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 ...
Viewpoint: Sweden’s unique approach to COVID-19 containment has failed
There was a familiar refrain from political commentators on certain corners of the internet in the early days of the ...
The human brain may not be such a great model for designing artificial intelligence
[M]ost artificial neural networks are decidedly un-brainlike, in part because they learn using mathematical tricks that would be difficult, if ...
Accidental side effect: COVID-19 pandemic could give polio ‘a fresh start’
The world’s total number of confirmed Covid-19 cases is closing in on 5 million. But an accidental side effect of ...
‘That’s not easy’: Figuring out who gets first shot at a coronavirus vaccine
Even if scientists do develop a safe, broadly effective vaccine, nobody knows how to give it to billions of people ...
How coronavirus wreaks havoc on the body, organ by organ
Covid-19 has confounded the expectations of doctors. Patients suffer from a bewildering variety of complications. They urinate blood, complain of ...
‘Skin hunger’: That burning desire for human contact supercharged by the coronavirus pandemic
Once a week, Alice, who lives alone, walks to the end of her garden to meet her best friend Lucy ...
‘Microbe maps’: Swabbing subways, ATMs and park benches to find coronavirus hot spots
Nearly a decade ago, after watching his young daughter lick a pole in a subway car, computational biologist Christopher Mason ...
Lessons learned from the past: Why rushing a coronavirus vaccine could be dangerous
Annual flu shots don’t need to go through clinical trials every time they are adjusted for each year’s flu strain, ...
Squids’ ability to edit their own RNA could lead to human disease treatments
For nearly every animal on Earth, any changes made to the DNA are transmitted from the cell nucleus by messenger ...
Infographic: Fighting the coronavirus pandemic with collaborative science and data sharing
On February 27, a teenager in the Seattle area was diagnosed with Covid-19. Shortly after, researchers at the Seattle Flu Study shared genomic data ...
CRISPR-based ‘PAC-MAN approach’ could be answer to COVID-19 and other viral menaces
Tim Abbott, a PhD candidate at Stanford University’s bioengineering department, checked the results of an experiment that he was running ...
Predicting the next coronavirus outbreak by mining genetic databases
Search “coronavirus” on GenBank, a public repository for genomes, and today you’ll find more than 35,000 sequences. Alpaca coronaviruses. Hedgehog coronaviruses ...
Alzheimer’s research is stuck on a ‘single, unproven hypothesis’. It’s time to explore new theories
Over the past decade we’ve seen failure after failure in clinical trials for neurodegenerative disease. Despite over 200 clinical trials, ...
We’ve mapped a fly brain down ‘to the very last neuron’. That’s a big deal for human brain research
[A]s director of Janelia Research Campus, part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, [Gerry Rubin has] spent the last 12 ...
Terminally ill cancer patients donating their bodies for research on how tumors spread
It sounds macabre, but it’s important research. [Andrew] Rowan is one of a team of experts working on a new ...
3D-printed plastic bunny contains its own blueprint coded in synthetic DNA
The kumquat-sized bunny, cute as it may be, isn’t a toy or a good luck charm. But if you cut ...
How well-intentioned research into ‘gay genes’ spawned controversial DNA screening app
A giant collection of carefully cataloged genomes, called the UK Biobank, was about to become available to researchers. … To [researcher ...
