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Is tilapia a human-made freak that we should avoid — or an evolutionary rockstar?

Genetic Literacy Project | 
Posts were appearing on my Facebook feed warning against the dangers of eating tilapia. So I decided to do a ...
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Probiotics are ‘enticing target’ for gene editing — but is CRISPR up for the challenge?

Genetic Literacy Project | 
Every morning I pop a Pearl probiotic. I try hard not to drop it, for the tiny, slippery yellow sphere ...
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Is Alzheimer’s disease transmissible?

Genetic Literacy Project | 
Five people treated for pituitary dwarfism decades ago with human growth hormone (hGH) pooled from cadavers have shown cognitive decline ...
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Biological exceptionalism: How two Italian sisters lived to 100

Genetic Literacy Project | 
In my endless email about COVID-19 popped up a new paper analyzing the health of two Italian sisters who lived ...
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Filling the gaps of what we know about the first days and weeks of the developing human embryo

Genetic Literacy Project | 
Several recent reports are filling in the gaps of what we know about the earliest days and weeks of human ...
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Nether region science—What’s the allure for cats of fellow feline rear ends?

Genetic Literacy Project | 
Anyone who lives with more than one member of Felis catus knows that our beloved felines love to smell each other’s ...
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Here’s the straight poop about fecal transplants

Genetic Literacy Project | 
Fecal transplants carry a certain ick factor for many people. But there is a legitimate medical use for them -- ...
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On the anniversary of Kristallnacht, as the Israel-Hamas War rages, a DNA data leak of Jewish 23andMe customers raises fears of modern-day Jewish yellow badges

Genetic Literacy Project | 
Tonight is the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, “The Night of Broken Glass.” On November 9 and 10, 1938, Storm Troopers, ...
Will AI make biology textbook authors redundant? Here's one author's view of ChatGPT

Will AI make biology textbook authors redundant? Here’s one author’s view of ChatGPT

Genetic Literacy Project | 
I just used ChatGPT for the first time. Initially, I was concerned about my future as the chatbot near-instantaneously answered ...
How octopi can edit their own RNA to rapidly respond to environmental changes

How octopi can edit their own RNA to rapidly respond to environmental changes

Genetic Literacy Project | 
How organisms rapidly respond to a challenge: For an octopus, that might be a sudden plunge in water temperature, which ...
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Perpetuating the ‘nerd’ stereotype: Why I won’t watch Apple TV+’s ‘Lessons in Chemistry’

Genetic Literacy Project | 
Lessons in Chemistry, set to debut on Apple TV+ October 13, is based on the best-selling 2022 novel by Bonnie ...
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Natural selection, artificial selection, and now political selection: How vaccine rejectionism is altering the course of evolution, and not in a good way

Genetic Literacy Project | 
“A sharp partisan divide remains over new Covid boosters,” reads the headline announcing a recent poll from Politico, as respiratory ...
What do 'non-identical' identical twins have to do with COVID-19? Mutations!

What do ‘non-identical’ identical twins have to do with COVID-19? Mutations!

Genetic Literacy Project | 
Identical twins Stella and Desiree Vignes were born in 1938 in a Louisiana town so small that it wasn’t on ...
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‘The single most notorious killer of humans’: What are the true origins of the 14th century Black Plague?

Genetic Literacy Project | 
It’s rare that compelling clues converge to illuminate a longstanding medical mystery: the origin of the Black Death, a bubonic ...
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Sequencing the watermelon family tree reveals ‘lost’ disease-resistance genes that were bred out generations ago

As autumn looms, we’re enjoying the last bites of sweet, juicy watermelon ...
Why is it so difficult to find a treatment for Huntington’s Disease?

Why is it so difficult to find a treatment for Huntington’s Disease?

Genetic Literacy Project | 
The Huntington’s disease (HD) community has recently experienced setbacks, but a new research report may reignite hope, from an unexpected ...
Meet the beetles: Mealworms could be a food of the future

Meet the beetles: Mealworms could be a food of the future

Genetic Literacy Project | 
I have a special fondness for the yellow mealworm, Tenebrio molitor. As a child, I fed the mealworm stage of ...
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7,000+ rare diseases remain untreatable. The genetic revolution and federal research funding offers hope for cures, but vaccine hesitancy and a lack of newborn screening pose hurdles

Genetic Literacy Project | 
There are an estimated 7,000 known rare diseases affecting 30 million people; for 95% of them, there are no treatment ...
Revelations from the embryo: Glimpses into the prenatal period

Revelations from the embryo: Glimpses into the prenatal period

Genetic Literacy Project | 
Two weeks after sperm fertilizes egg is a critical time in human prenatal development. Intricate waves of signals stamp cells ...
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How COVID can lodge itself in our brains

Genetic Literacy Project | 
As the fourth year of the pandemic dawns, a study published in Nature from Daniel Chertow, MD, MPH, head of ...
Why did Ellie in the Last of Us not succumb to Cordy, the zombie virus? Stem cells might explain it, and that could yield real-life vaccines

Why did Ellie in the Last of Us not succumb to Cordy, the zombie virus? Stem cells might explain it, and that could yield real-life vaccines

Genetic Literacy Project | 
It’s unsettling to watch The Last of Us, in which parasitic fungi turn humanity into flesh-eating zombies, just as the ...
Faith genes? Can our DNA predipose us to faith and spirituality?

Faith genes? Can DNA predispose us to religion and spirituality?

Genetic Literacy Project | 
Do our genes predispose us to follow a religion? I searched Google Scholar for reports on the inheritance of religiosity ...
Viewpoint: Why health care based on our race is so problematic

Viewpoint: Why health care based on race is so problematic

Genetic Literacy Project | 
Choosing a medical treatment based on patient traits historically used to define races is fundamentally flawed, because race in the ...
Genomic scars: How centuries of surviving antisemitism has shaped Jewish genetics

Genomic scars: How centuries of surviving antisemitism has shaped Jewish genetics

Genetic Literacy Project | 
Between election news and the ever-earlier encroachment of Christmas, an important November anniversary of a horrific event goes mostly unnoticed: ...
How might we adapt to fast-changing global temperatures? 2-million year old ‘environmental DNA’ offers clues

How might we adapt to fast-changing global temperatures? 2-million year old ‘environmental DNA’ offers clues

Genetic Literacy Project | 
The reconstruction of a once-living landscape in northern Greenland from 2 million years ago, deduced from bits of DNA bound ...
The evolution of COVID

Can we know for sure COVID’s origins? Why is Omicron so persistent? Knowing how evolution works provides guidance

Genetic Literacy Project | 
The latest phrase borrowed from biology in COVID conversations is convergent evolution. It refers to pairs of unrelated species that ...
How cats got their stripes: The mystery of color patterns in mammals

How cats got their stripes: The mystery of color patterns in mammals

Genetic Literacy Project | 
In 1902’s Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling famously explained how the leopard got his spots in what would today be deemed an ...
Evoking Jeff Goldblum’s ‘The Fly’: Does growing human ‘brains-in-a-dish’ and creating chimeras cross a bioethical line?

Evoking Jeff Goldblum’s ‘The Fly’: Does growing human ‘brains-in-a-dish’ and creating chimeras cross a bioethical line?

Genetic Literacy Project | 
Bits of human brain growing in a lab dish can reveal a great deal about how a disease begins and ...
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