Perhaps the greatest question driving science—and human thought in general—is the mystery of origins. This question has manifested itself in myriad shapes and sizes: our fascination with the Big Bang, the birth of our Earth, the evolution of our own species, and even our own individual genealogies. Especially as many have turned away from religion—the […]
Biology
Posted inBiology, Evolution, News, Science
Surprise! The Nobel goes to evolutionary sciences, not COVID research
Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo joined a rare group this morning: not just of Nobel Prize winners, but of “family Nobels”. His father, Karl Sune Detlof Bergström, shared the 1982 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane, for work related to local-tissue hormones, or “prostaglandins”. Forty years later, that award went solely […]
Posted inBiology, News, Science
Life on Mars? Perseverance rover finds organic matter
Humans have been captivated by fictional images of Martian life since the 19th century. In 1877, Giovanni Schiaparelli, an Italian astronomer, observed canali–channels, then mistranslated as canals–on the planet, unintentionally sparking a movement of Martian conspiracists enchanted by the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Since then, we’ve been inching closer and closer to finding the real […]
Posted inBiology
How soon we forget: Vaccines are life
Vaccines have saved tens of millions of lives already, and more are coming soon that promise to deliver us from the worst killers of humanity.
Posted inBiology, Health, Healthcare, News, Science
Polio’s back, and the CDC’s latest update could make things worse
In late August, the US reported a case of paralytic polio in an unvaccinated adult in Rockland County, New York. This first case in the US since 2013 was concerning because it emerged in an area with especially low vaccination rates (around 60 percent, to the country’s average of 80 percent), and was still appearing […]
Posted inBiology
AI solves the protein-folding problem
Protein folding, one of the greatest unsolved problems of biology, is yielding to advances in artificial intelligence.
Posted inBiology, Deep Dive
The fellowship of the living
Discrimination directed at age, what we called ageism, goes every which way, whether toward the young or the old. Even people a year or two apart can be ageist. An eight-year-old can disdain a six-year-old, and a 14-year-old will certainly look with scorn on a 12-year-old. A 75-year-old can think a 95-year-old is a lumbering fool. […]
Posted inBiology, Climate Crisis, Environment
Bringing the Tasmanian tiger back from extinction (or not)
Is the Tasmanian tiger trending for you? You’re not alone. The University of Melbourne has been in the news sporadically all year, each time “announcing” its interest in returning an extinct species, the thylacine, to life. Today, Texas-based and celebrity-backed Colossal Biosciences showed up as the winning bid to partner with the Australian project, after […]
Posted inBiology, Health, Healthcare, News, Science
How bad reporting turned zero deaths into a ‘75% death rate’ for the latest virus
On August 4, Chinese and Singaporean scientists published a paper on a novel Henipavirus now present in humans, and elements of their work are now making the rounds in mainstream and social media in a highly irresponsible manner. Here’s what you need to know about the Langya henipavirus (also known as LayV), which has a […]
Posted inBiology, Healthcare, News, Science
Living synthetic embryo, made from stem cells, grown without a uterus
On Monday, Cell published the results of embryonic experiments carried out by the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, which has been studying the potential of stem cells to give rise to entire embryonic structures. Its latest findings reveal the capacity to culture mouse stem cells to the state of an 8.5-day-old embryo—without the use […]