Find out what’s happening in Science & Society around the world. Discover changes to science policy and law, new scientific study results, Supreme Court rulings, debates about nature versus nurture, and news about the sharing of genetic information.
On March 28, 2018, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced that the USDA wouldn’t regulate new plant varieties developed with new technologies like genome editing that would yield plants indistinguishable from those developed through traditional breeding methods.
Starting in the next month or so, Geisinger Health System will offer DNA sequencing to 1,000 patients, with the goal of eventually extending the offer to all 3 million Geisinger patients.
The “game” starts with just a tiny segment of a mouse retina scanned in 2009. Eyewire gamers then trace the twists and turns of the neurons in this data, one tiny “cube” roughly 4.5 microns across at a time.
In case you missed it, Duke researcher and S&S instructor Sara Katsanis speaks with Julie Rose on Top of Mind about the ethics of using DNA databases to solve crimes, like the recent Golden State Killer cold case.
Last year we hosted a Periodic Tables that considered what our world might look like without chocolate. Lloyd Timberlake shared how rising demand, sick cacao trees, and harsh economic realities point toward a massive potential chocolate shortage. Now new applications of CRISPR-Cas9 tech could help fight some of the causes.