Brenna Henn: In my lab, we’re interested in characterizing human diversity, especially from populations that live in Africa or are descendants from Africa. One thing we wanted to address is the huge focus on personalized genetic medicine. The idea is that you get your genome sequenced, and then for heart disease or tuberculosis — pick your favorite disease — we’ll be able to give you a score of how likely you’ll be to develop these things.

Continue reading “She Wanted to Improve Genetic Medicine” →

If you live in the United States, chances are you’re familiar with the game rock-paper-scissors. You put out your hand in one of three gestures: clenching it in a fist (rock), holding it out flat (paper) or holding up two fingers in a “V” (scissors). Rock beats scissors, scissors beat paper and paper beats rock.

Americans by no means have a monopoly on the game. People play it around the world in many variations, and under many names. In Japan, where the game has existed for thousands of years, it’s known as janken. In Indonesia, it’s known as earwig-man-elephant: The elephant kills the man, the man kills the earwig and the earwig crawls up through the elephant’s trunk and eats its brain.

Continue reading “This Diminutive Reptile Plays Rock-Paper-Scissors” →

Marina Vance: I’ve been working on air quality since I was an undergraduate student in Brazil — for more than 20 years. I was at Virginia Tech for eight years for my Ph.D and as a postdoctoral researcher, and then I came to the University of Colorado in 2016.

Growing up in Brazil, I’m from an island in a very humid place. Wildfires are not big where I’m from at all. And then living in Virginia, I wasn’t exposed to them either.

Continue reading “She Studied the Health Effects of Wildfires” →

Some 400,000 years ago, in what is now eastern England, a group of Neanderthals used flint and pyrite to make fires by a watering hole — not just once, but time after time, over several generations.

That is the conclusion of a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. Previously, the oldest known evidence of humans making fires dated back just 50,000 years. The new finding indicates that this critical step in human history occurred much earlier.

Continue reading “Archaeologists Find Oldest Evidence of Fire-Making” →

Earlier this year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine issued a warning about the dangers of misinformation. Social media platforms are now rife with scientific falsehoods — that the Earth is flat, that climate change is a hoax, and so on. Misinformation can lead to large-scale harm, undermining public health and the well-being of the planet, the authors of the National Academies report said.

Continue reading “For Real, a Natural History of Misinformation” →