The US Just Greenlit High-Tech Alternatives to Animal Testing
[ad_1] The Covid-19 crisis highlighted certain economic and welfare issues associated with using animals for research. Pandemic-related closures meant that many labs had to halt experiments and euthanize animals. Then the…
Here’s What’s Next for Pig Organ Transplants
[ad_1] Starting in the 1960s, doctors attempted transplants of kidneys, hearts, and livers from baboons and chimpanzees—humans’ closest genetic relatives—into people. But the organs failed within weeks, if not days,…
A More Elegant Form of Gene Editing Progresses to Human Testing
[ad_1] In April 2016, Waseem Qasim, a professor of cell and gene therapy, was captivated by a new scientific paper that described a revolutionary way to manipulate DNA: base editing. The…
The Crispr Baby Scientist Is Back. Here’s What He’s Doing Next
[ad_1] Some scientists and ethicists think He deserves a chance to prove that he’s capable of producing scientifically valid and ethically sound work. “His case is publicly known enough that…
The Era of One-Shot, Multimillion-Dollar Genetic Cures Is Here
[ad_1] The company said the price was determined with consideration of the “clinical, societal, economic, and innovative value represented by this novel gene therapy.” Earlier last month, the Institute for…
All the Actually Important Stuff Neuralink Just Announced
[ad_1] The most widely tested brain implant is the Utah array—a hard silicon square with 100 tiny protruding needles. Each about a millimeter long, the needles have electrodes on their…
Turns Out Fighting Mosquitoes With Mosquitoes Actually Works
[ad_1] The Aedes aegypti mosquito is not just a nuisance—it’s a known carrier of dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya, and Zika viruses. Distinguished by the black and white stripes on its legs, the…
This Personalized Crispr Therapy Is Designed to Attack Tumors
[ad_1] In a new step for Crispr, scientists have used the gene-editing tool to make personalized modifications to cancer patients’ immune cells to supercharge them against their tumors. In a…
This Gulp of Engineered Bacteria Is Meant to Treat Disease
[ad_1] In the muddy trenches of World War I, thousands of soldiers on both sides fell ill with dysentery, a diarrheal disease often spread by contaminated water. Curiously, one German…
How to Detect a Man-Made Biothreat
[ad_1] But even if the platforms’ accuracy improves, it’s hard to know whether they would be able to detect a completely new organism that scientists have never seen before. Richard…
The Quest to Treat Binge-Eating and Addiction—With Brain Zaps
[ad_1] “It may be that stimulation of the nucleus accumbens altered the reward circuitry in the brain such that it turned down the volume on the pleasurable craving that patients…
How Iodine Pills Can—and Can’t—Help Against Radiation
[ad_1] As unease about Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling grows, along with concerns about the safety of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, officials in Kyiv are distributing iodine pills to help protect…
Lab-Grown Human Brain Tissue Works in Rats
[ad_1] The tiny blobs of lab-grown human brain tissue were just specks, each measuring a few millimeters in diameter. Researchers at Stanford University made them by cultivating human stem cells…
A Bold Effort to Cure HIV—Using Crispr
[ad_1] Dornbusch thinks this strategy will spare patients from serious side effects and “off-target” edits—unintentional cuts elsewhere in the genome that could cause problems such as cancer. The regions targeted…
The Era of Fast, Cheap Genome Sequencing Is Here
[ad_1] Comparing those genomes to those of people without schizophrenia has allowed investigators to uncover multiple genes that have a profound impact on a person’s risk of developing it. By…
There’s New Proof Crispr Can Edit Genes Inside Human Bodies
[ad_1] The Crispr components can’t naturally get into cells on their own, so Intellia uses a delivery system called lipid nanoparticles—essentially tiny fat bubbles—to ferry them to the liver. In…
How a ‘Living Drug’ Could Treat Autoimmune Disease
[ad_1] In lupus, a type of autoimmune disease, the body’s natural defense system can’t tell the difference between its own cells and foreign ones, so it mistakenly attacks its own…
A GMO Purple Tomato Is Coming to Grocery Aisles. Will the US Bite?
[ad_1] In December 2004, plant scientist Cathie Martin went to the greenhouse to check on her tomatoes. The tiny fruits, about the size of gumdrops, were still green. These miniature…
How Does a Variant-Specific Covid Booster Work?
[ad_1] The Covid-19 messenger RNA vaccines are getting an update. The new booster shots rolling out across the US and Europe this week are specifically tailored to currently circulating Omicron…
An Effort to ID Tulsa Race Massacre Victims Raises Privacy Issues
[ad_1] But this is far from the first time family members’ genetic material has been used to put names to unidentified remains. Scientists around the world have used DNA to…
This Man Set the Record for Wearing a Brain-Computer Interface
[ad_1] With so few people outfitted with these devices, their longevity is still unknown. So far, the Utah array has lasted up to 10 years in monkeys. In Copeland’s case,…
Police Used a Baby’s DNA to Investigate Its Father for a Crime
[ad_1] According to the New Jersey lawsuit, police had reopened an investigation into a cold case and had used genetics to place the suspect within a single family: one of…
A Bioengineered Cornea Shows It Can Improve People’s Sight
[ad_1] After their transplants, the researchers followed the volunteers for two years. They concluded that the implants were safe to use and restored the thickness and curvature of the recipients’…
The Pigs Died. Then Scientists Revived Their Cells
[ad_1] The pigs had been dead for an hour. The cause: cardiac arrest. But six hours after researchers at Yale University connected their bodies to a machine pumping a nutrient-rich…
There’s a Monkeypox Testing Bottleneck
[ad_1] But while a monkeypox test already existed, it required lab workers to do each step by hand, Morice says. Federal guidelines say testing should be done only by swabbing…