Ed Yong
Is it time to discuss what we should or shouldn’t do with ‘lab-grown blobs of human brain tissue’?
Rusty Gage and colleagues at the Salk Institute [recently] announced that they had successfully transplanted lab-grown blobs of human brain tissue ...
Delving into the minds of psychopaths
It’s a rare person who goes out of their way to spend time with psychopaths, and a rarer one still ...
Personalized piglets could offer insights into disease progression in children
To better understand [incurable inherited disease neurofibromatosis type 1, Charles] Konsitzke learned, you need a species that’s closer in both ...
How evolution contributed to the demise of the passenger pigeon
Passenger pigeons were once the most abundant bird in North America, and quite possibly the world. … In a matter ...
Oldest known human fossils rewrite Homo sapiens history
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, around 62 miles west of what would eventually become Marrakesh, a group of people ...
Brain studies weakened by lack of diversity in participants
[S]ocial sciences [tend] to focus on people from WEIRD societies—that is, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. The results of such studies ...
One-fourth of cow genome descendant from snakes and lizards, study shows
There are genes known as retrotransposons that can copy themselves and paste the duplicates in other parts of our DNA, ...
CRISPR co-inventor Jennifer Doudna embraces ethical debate over gene editing
As few as five years ago, [biochemist Jennifer Doudna] was, by her own admission, working head-down in an ivory tower, with ...
Diseases and behaviors likely the product of thousands of genes with complex interactions
If you told a modern geneticist that a complex trait...was the work of just 15 genes, they’d probably laugh. It’s ...
Discovery of 315,000-year old human fossils may rewrite history of our ancestors
[B]ones of the former occupants [of a Moroccan cave called Jebel Irhoud] have been recently unearthed by an international team ...
Hi-C: Quick genome sequencing cracked Zika mosquito genome, more advances likely
Ten years ago, a team of scientists published the first genome of Aedes aegypti—the infamous mosquito that spreads Zika, dengue ...
Would loss of genetic privacy protection scare people away from research participation?
GINA—the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act—was written...[to prevent] employers from basing employment decisions on someone’s genes [and to stop] health insurers ...
Eczema-taming ointment could be made with bacteria from your own skin
Teruaki Nakatsuji and Richard Gallo from the University of California, San Diego, have discovered that some bacteria which naturally live ...
Alzheimer’s linked gene may protect brain from parasites
People who carry one copy [of the ApoE4 gene] have a three-fold higher risk of Alzheimer’s than those with none...Even if ...
Future of Alzheimer’s treatment? Flickering lights
[If neurons fire] 30 to 90 times [in a single second], that’s a gamma wave, which has been linked to ...
Your brain uses different regions to remember something clearly and vividly
In an elegant experiment, a team of neuroscientists led by Jon Simons at the University of Cambridge have shown that ...
Genes linked with schooling does not mean they affect education directly
[I]n a study of almost 294,000 people, an international team led by Daniel Benjamin, David Cesarini, and Philipp Koellinger has ...
Video: Scientists film bacteria evolving antibiotic resistance in real time
Ever since the invention of antibiotics, we have been fighting an escalating arms race against bacteria for several decades. Michael ...
Lichens formed through symbiosis among three organisms, not two
Lichens have an important place in biology. . . . they’re composite organisms, consisting of fungi that live in partnership ...
Piecing together how Lucy, world’s most famous fossil, perished
In 1974, scientists working in Ethiopia uncovered an extraordinary female skeleton, whom they called Lucy. She was 3.2 million years ...
Neither good ‘microbes’ nor ‘bad microbes’ truly exist
[For centuries,] [m]icrobes became synonymous with squalor and sickness. They became foes for us to annihilate and repel. Today, we ...
How gene-swapping microbes helped humans evolve
Bacteria have been carrying out these horizontal gene transfers, or HGT for short, for billions of years. But it wasn’t ...
Why is information on tumor-causing genes hard for patients to access?
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. In the world of ...
Is it incorrect to consider brain akin to computer?
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. The human brain contains ...
Fruit fly’s enormous sperm appears to defy biology
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. In 1995, Scott Pitnick ...
Evidence from French cave suggests Neanderthals more sophisticated than previously believed
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. In February 1990, thanks ...
Antibiotic resistant bacteria could kill 10 million every year by 2050
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Under instructions from U.K ...
What makes your gut microbiome special?
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. There are tens of ...
