In the classic 1966 American science fiction film Fantastic Voyage, a submarine crew was miniaturized and injected into a body to fix a blood clot in the brain. That’s obviously not how future medical science is going to work, but the notion of creating microscopic machines to perform complex tasks is certainly on…
In 2012, the artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg exhibited a work that predicted a terrifying future: She extracted DNA from discarded hairs, gum and cigarette butts and used it to predict what those anonymous strangers might look like. The traces of ourselves that we are constantly leaving behind, she thought, could unleash…
As a young child, every morning at sunrise I would wake up to tap dance on the patio outside my mom’s bedroom door, much to my poor mom’s chagrin. These sunrise salutations became an enduring family story, as did my habit of getting up with the sun. Imagine my surprise, then, when a DNA test recently suggested that I…
Your DNA is some of the most intimate information out there—encoded in it is information about your health, your personality, your family history. It’s not hard to imagine how such sensitive details could be damaging should they fall into the wrong hands. And yet, the privacy practices of the people and programs…
It’s just you and your mates in a hotel, braving the dark and the cold, sealed off from the outside world. But you soon find it hard to breathe. The oxygen levels are dropping, and you just don’t know why.
American scientists have accomplished a major first: For the first time on US soil, a human embryo has been genetically modified. The details of the breakthrough, which was leaked to the press last week, are reported in a study published today in the journal Nature.
Today in America, if you are poor, you are also more likely to suffer from poor health. Low socioeconomic status—and the lack of access to healthcare that often accompanies it—has been tied to mental illness, obesity, heart disease and diabetes, to name just a few.
Dr. George Church is a real-life Dr. Frankenstein. The inventor of CRISPR and one of the minds behind the Human Genome Project is no longer content just reading and editing DNA—now he wants to make new life. In Ben Mezrich’s latest book, Wooly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History’s Most Iconic Extinct…
For more than half a century, scientists have dreamed of harnessing an odd quirk of nature— “selfish genes,” which bypass the normal 50/50 laws of inheritance and force their way into offspring—to engineer entire species. A few years ago, the advent of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology turned this science…
The premise behind Yes or No Genomics is simple: Genetic disease is typically caused by a variation in at least one of the many thousands of genes in the human genome, so knowing whether your DNA code contains variants could suggest whether your health is at risk. And for just $199, the scientists at Yes or No…
The fossilized remains of a tiny bird that lived 62 million years ago suggests that birds burst out of the evolutionary gates once their dinosaur cousins were gone, rapidly diversifying into most of the lineages we see today.
I’m just minding my business watching the biggest sporting event of the day—Peñarol vs. Defensor in the Uruguayan Primera Division, of course—and on comes this ad for a Miami-based company that promises to improve your child’s soccer abilities through DNA sequencing of his or her genome.
There’s no doubt that inflammatory bowel disease is horrible. Its consequences, all sorts of gastrointestinal distress, can be downright debilitating. But treating it is full of uncertainty—folks with the same symptoms might respond in wildly different ways. That’s why scientists are trying to pinpoint its cause,…
Cats play an essential role in our everyday lives. They have many jobs around the house, such as monitoring humans in the bathroom, knocking stuff off tables to make sure gravity still exists, and most importantly, being our snuggle buddies. While cats might seem perfectly content with being couch potatoes, the…
The more data, the better, right? When it comes to genetics, it turns out that might not be the case.
When people talk about the gene-editing technology CRISPR, it’s usually accompanied by adjectives like “revolutionary” or “world-changing.” For this reason, it’s no surprise that a study out last month questioning just how game-changing the technology really is caused quite a stir.
Scientists have long understood that dogs with flat faces like pugs and bulldogs are the result of out-of-control selective breeding. But they’ve yet to discover the exact genetic mutation that’s responsible for the physical traits of these dogs. A new study has gone a long way towards finding the answer and could…
As companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com help make genetic testing commonplace, you would think that we would become better at ensuring protections for the privacy of that data. Instead, multiple Congressional actions threaten to erode already-weak protections against genetic discrimination. But it’s not just a…
Lots of people really want to go to Mars. Some of them want to live on that barren litter box forever, which sounds exciting, but would probably suck. The thing about a Martian colony is that people would have to be able to reproduce there in order to keep it going—and luckily for those hopeful pioneers, a team of…
At altitudes of 15,000 feet, Tibetans live in environments that would incapacitate most humans. New research has uncovered several genetic mutations that appear to be responsible for these high-altitude superpowers—including a trait inherited from an extinct human species.
