Unexpected Risks Found In Editing Genes To Prevent Inherited Disorders

"In September, reproductive endocrinologist John Zhang and his team at the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City captured the world's attention when they announced the birth of a child to a mother carrying a fatal genetic defect."

"Using a technique called mitochondrial replacement therapy, the researchers combined DNA from two women and one man to bypass the defect and produce a healthy baby boy — one with, quite literally, three genetic parents."

"It was heralded as a stunning technological leap for in vitro fertilization, albeit one that the team was forced to perform in Mexico, because the technique has not been approved in the United States."

"The technique is spreading quickly, gaining official approval this month from the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority in the U.K. The move will allow clinics to apply for permission there to carry out the treatment, with the first patients expected to be seen as early as next year."

From Psychedelics To Alzheimer's, 2016 Was A Good Year For Brain Science

"With a president-elect who has publicly supported the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism, suggested that climate change is a hoax dreamed up by the Chinese, and appointed to his Cabinet a retired neurosurgeon who doesn't buy the theory of evolution, things might look grim for science."

"Yet watching Patti Smith sing "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" live streamed from the Nobel Prize ceremony in early December to a room full of physicists, chemists and physicians — watching her twice choke up, each time stopping the song altogether, only to push on through all seven wordy minutes of one of Bob Dylan's most beloved songs — left me optimistic."

"Taking nothing away from the very real anxieties about future funding and support for science, neuroscience in particular has had plenty of promising leads that could help fulfill Alfred Nobel's mission to better humanity. In the spirit of optimism, and with input from the Society for Neuroscience, here are a few of the noteworthy neuroscientific achievements of 2016."

"One of the more fascinating fields of neuroscience of late entails mapping the crosstalk between our biomes, brains and immune systems."

As We Leave More Digital Tracks, Amazon Echo Factors In Murder Investigation

"Amazon's personal assistant device called Echo was one of the most popular gifts this Christmas. But this week, the device grabbed headlines for another reason: Police in Arkansas are trying to use its data in a murder investigation."

"What we know from court documents is that in November 2015, a man in Arkansas had some friends over at his house to watch a football game and in the morning, one of the friends was found dead in a hot tub in the backyard. Police later charged the man who lived in the house, James Bates, with murder. He has pleaded not guilty."

"As the police were investigating the crime, they found a number of digital devices in the suspect's house, including an Amazon Echo device that was in the kitchen. They have since seized the device and have apparently gotten some information from it, but what they want to check is what — if anything — the device may have recorded around the time of the murder."

Big Newspapers Are Booming: 'Washington Post' To Add 60 Newsroom Jobs

"The Washington Post expects to hire more than 60 journalists in the coming months — a sign of remarkable growth for a newspaper in the digital age."

"After a year of record traffic and digital advertising revenue, the Post newsroom will grow by more than 8 percent, to more than 750 people. The extent of the newsroom expansion was first reported by Politico. The Post will add a "rapid-response" investigative team, expand its video journalism and breaking news staff, and make additional investments in podcasts and photography."

"Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Post in October 2013 and reportedly invested $50 million in the company last year. That investment is paying off, according to a memo from publisher Fred Ryan that said the Post is now "a profitable and growing company." Ryan said the Post's online traffic had increased by nearly 50 percent in the past year, and new subscriptions have grown by 75 percent, more than doubling digital subscription revenue."

Vera Rubin, Who Confirmed Existence Of Dark Matter, Dies At 88

"Vera Rubin, the groundbreaking astrophysicist who discovered evidence of dark matter, died Sunday night at the age of 88, the Carnegie Institution confirms."

"Rubin did much of her revelatory work at Carnegie. The organization's president calls her a 'national treasure.'"

"In the 1960s and 1970s, Rubin was working with astronomer Kent Ford, studying the behavior of spiral galaxies, when they discovered something entirely unexpected — the stars at the outside of the galaxy were moving as fast as the ones in the middle, which didn't fit with Newtonian gravitational theory."

"The explanation: Dark matter."

Editors' Choice: 9 Global Feel-Good Stories From 2016

"There was no shortage of sad news in 2016."

"And because we're a blog that covers global health and development, we covered a lot of those sobering stories: the toll of diseases like Zika, the bombing of hospitals in conflict zones, the suffering caused by poverty and by discrimination against women."

"But we published a lot of hopeful stories as well. We asked our team at Goats and Soda to pick some of the stories from this year that inspired them the most. We hope you're inspired too."

How Much Is Too Much? New Study Casts Doubts On Sugar Guidelines

"By now, you've very likely heard the case for limiting sugar."

"Over the past two years the World Health Organization and the U.S. Dietary Guidelines have begun urging us to consume no more than 10 percent of our daily calories from added sugar. Drinking more than one sugar-sweetened soda a day can put you over that limit."

"But a new industry-funded study published in a prominent medical journal questions the evidence used to generate the specific recommendations to limit sugar in our diets."

"'Overall, I would say the guidelines are not trustworthy,' says study author Bradley Johnston, a clinical epidemiologist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto who also teaches biostatistics."

See Red In A New Light: Imperial China Meets Mark Rothko In D.C. Exhibition

"This holiday season, the color red is the focus of a small exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. The Smithsonian show finds links between a 15th-century Ming dynasty dish and a 20th-century painting by Mark Rothko."

"The dish was made for an emperor in 1430, and it's rare — there are only about 35 of them left. It has simple lines and a rich color (red, of course). Curator Jan Stuart fell in love with the dish and set about adding it to her gallery's collection. She showed it to experts, the gallery's board and members of the National Commission of Fine Arts. According to Stuart, several had the same reaction: 'Oh, I get it. It's like Rothko.'"

"The gallery bought the dish, and a concept was born: Put it on view with a luminous Mark Rothko painting — one that layers tones of red into two vertical rectangles — borrowed from the National Gallery of Art. The result is a mini-show brought together by color."

"The Ming dish is the color of crushed raspberries. To get that hue, imperial potters mixed a tiny amount of finely ground copper oxide into their glaze. Back then, getting the right red was tricky: too much copper and you get a liver color; too little and it totally disappears in the firing. "It is the single hardest color to control in the kiln," Stuart says."

Scientists Blast Antimatter Atoms With A Laser For The First Time

"In a technological tour de force, scientists have developed a new way to probe antimatter."

"For the first time, researchers were able to zap antimatter atoms with a laser, then precisely measure the light let off by these strange anti-atoms. By comparing the light from anti-atoms with the light from regular atoms, they hope to answer one of the big mysteries of our universe: Why, in the early universe, did antimatter lose out to regular old matter?"

"'This represents a historic point in the decades-long efforts to create antimatter and compare its properties to those of matter,' says Alan Kostelecky, a theoretical physicist at Indiana University."

"Antimatter sounds like something out of science fiction. 'The first time I heard about antimatter was on Star Trek, when I was a kid," says Jeffrey Hangst, a physicist at Aarhus University in Denmark. "I was intrigued by what it was and then kind of shocked to learn that it was a real thing in physics.'"

Overdue By More Than 120 Years, A Library Book Finally Finds Its Way Home

"Finally, after more than 120 years, Paul Smith has recovered something he never knew was missing in the first place."

"The headmaster at Hereford Cathedral School, near the boundary between Wales and England, had been looking at his mail earlier this month when he noticed a package wrapped in brown paper addressed to him. Smith guessed immediately that the package contained a thick book — but it wasn't until he read the note that came with it that he realized just how long that very book had been around."

"The note, sent by Alice Gillett, opened with an apology:

"I am sorry to inform you that one of your former pupils, Professor A.E. Boycott FRS [Fellow of the Royal Society], appears to have stolen the enclosed — I can't imagine how the school has managed without it!"

Seems like an open-and-shut case, to be sure — except that the professor in question had attended the school from 1886 to 1894. Gillett is his 77-year-old granddaughter. She says she found the book while sorting through her collection after her husband's death earlier this year."

California Gets Ready To Defy Trump's Washington

"With Donald Trump set to become president next month and Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress, California's Democrats believe their state should take the lead in opposing the new administration's priorities."

"And they have no interest in calls for national unity."

"'We must be defiant whenever justice, fairness, and righteousness require,' State Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon recently told lawmakers. 'Californians do not need healing. We need to fight.'"

"Rendon's message was greeted with rousing applause from Democrats, who command super-majorities in both chambers of the legislature."

"In the Obama administration, Republican-dominated states such as Texas often sought to block the president's agenda. In the Trump era, California may play that same role."

Radio Garden Lets You Tune Into A World Of Global Broadcasts

"Before my family bought a television set, it was radio that I stayed glued to. I must have been 10 years old, or maybe 9. My grandfather, uncle and I would sit close to a massive analogue radio. One of them delicately held the dial between the thumb and the index finger, fine-tuning, ear close to the speaker, listening carefully for a clear sentence of English amid the sizzle and the crackle of radio signals. A clear signal that lasted for barely a minute put a huge smile on our faces."

"Back in the late 1970s, the rectangular machine was our window into the world, a world we had never been to."

"Sometimes I listened to a cricket commentary for a game played in New Zealand, Or the news from BBC London. Every once in a while the radio caught a station that wasn't English, but I listened anyway. A foreign language from thousands of miles away — how exotic!"

"This week I stumbled upon a new website on the Internet called Radio Garden. Curious, I clicked on it and a globe started spinning before my eyes. It looked similar to Google Earth. Then I zoomed into the northeast part of the United States. And then a radio station started playing. On the bottom left side of the screen it said, Lewiston, United States. This is about 30 miles from Brunswick, Maine, where I now live. On the bottom right side, it said WRBC. The Bates College radio station was playing."

'Hidden Figures' No More: Meet The Black Women Who Helped Send America To Space

"On Feb. 20, 1962, John Glenn blasted off into space and became the first American to orbit Earth. Behind the scenes, thousands of engineers and mathematicians worked tirelessly to make NASA's Friendship 7 mission a success. Historical photos show them as white men in crisp white shirts and ties — but we now know there's more to that picture."

"In her book Hidden Figures, author Margot Lee Shetterly gives name and voice to the African-American women who worked as human "computers" in the space program. Now, just a few months after the book was published, a new movie is also telling that story. (The film rights were optioned just a couple of weeks after Shetterly got her book deal.) As mathematicians and engineers, these women made incalculable contributions to the space program — and the fact that they were African-Americans working in the segregated South makes their stories even more remarkable."

To Fight Malaria, Scientists Try Genetic Engineering To Wipe Out Mosquitoes

"It's a cold, damp fall day in London. But in a windowless basement laboratory, it feels like the tropics. It's hot and humid. That's to keep the mosquitoes happy."

"'In this cage, we have the adult mosquitoes,' says Andrew Hammond, a genetic engineer at Imperial College London, as he picks up a container made out of white mosquito netting."

"The lab is buzzing with hundreds of mosquitoes. "Everything in this cubicle is genetically modified," Hammond says, pointing to the container of mosquitoes."

"Scientists have altered mosquitoes' genes before. But these insects aren't just any genetically engineered mosquitoes."

"What makes these insects unusual is the way Hammond and his colleagues are modifying them. They're using a particularly potent type of genetic engineering called a "gene drive." These are sequences of DNA produced in the laboratory that defy the usual rules of genetics."

We Unravel The Science Mysteries Of Asparagus Pee

"As Ben Franklin noted, some of you have 'the Power of changing, by slight means, the smell of another discharge ... our water. A few stems of asparagus eaten, shall give our urine a disagreeable odour.' Apparently this is so common a power that the 18th century French botanist Louis Lémery wrote that asparagus causes 'a filthy and disagreeable smell in the urine, as everybody knows.'"

"Everybody except me, anyway."

"I'd never heard of this particular side effect of asparagus until I was in my 20s, and I ate plenty of asparagus growing up. The difference between people like myself and people like Lémery lies somewhere among more than 800 different genes, according to a new study that searched for genetic differences between those who claim they can and those who claim they can't smell asparagus pee."

"The researchers asked nearly 7,000 participants if they could detect a distinct smell in their urine after eating asparagus. About 40 percent of them strongly agreed they could. The other 4,161 people (I imagine) were confused by the question. According to the study, published in BMJ on Tuesday, these people share some combination of at least 871 different genetic alterations that may blunt their ability to smell asparagus pee."

Reading The Game: 'No Man's Sky'

"For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we've been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we're starting an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective."

"In the beginning, I breathed only methane."

"Seeded onto a pinkish and poisoned world of scouring winds, I stumbled from my broken spaceship, unsure of my footing or anything else. I saw strange plants moving, the stalagmite spikes of ore deposits like plutonium fangs, the wreckage of my crash, dust. When I moved, I heard nothing but the crunch of my heavy boots and the occasional chime from my spacesuit — followed, always, by the weirdly autotuned computer voice in my ear saying, "Environmental protection falling ..." And hers was the only human voice left to speak in the whole of this impossible universe."

"And I was hooked."

For Austria, A Tough Choice On What To Do With Hitler's Birthplace

"The question of what to do with Adolf Hitler's birth house has plagued his home country of Austria for decades."

"If it were up to the government in Vienna, authorities would simply tear it down. That's what Germany did more than a quarter-century ago to the Berlin bunker where Hitler committed suicide in 1945. The site is now covered by a parking lot, with a plain plaque providing the only hint of what used to be there."

"But many Austrians disagree with taking that approach to Hitler's birth house, including some residents of the Fuehrer's hometown, Braunau am Inn, near Salzburg."

"'It's a hot topic,' says Barbara Ebener, editorial director at the local weekly newspaper, BezirksRundschau. 'If this house is torn down, people don't want it left empty. And if it isn't left empty, the question is — will what goes up there instead be acceptable?'"

Million-Year-Old 'Hero Bug' Emerges From Cave

"Bacteria are way smarter than we give them credit for."

"No, I'm not talking about "brain smarts." Bacteria don't have neurons."

"I'm referring to "chemical smarts": the ability to make, break down or gobble up whatever compound they want. Even if they've never been exposed to it before."

"Scientists have found a superbug — hidden 1,000 feet underground in a cave — which is resistant to 70 percent of antibiotics and can totally inactivate many of them."

"But here's the kicker. This bacterium has been isolated from people, society — and drugs — for 4 million years, scientists report Thursday in the journal Nature Communications."

"That means it hasn't been exposed to human drugs in a clinic or on a farm that uses them. But it has the machinery to knock out these drugs. And that machinery has been around for millions of years."

Life Expectancy In U.S. Drops For First Time In Decades, Report Finds

"One of the fundamental ways scientists measure the well-being of a nation is tracking the rate at which its citizens die and how long they can be expected to live."

"So the news out of the federal government Thursday is disturbing: The overall U.S. death rate has increased for the first time in a decade, according to an analysis of the latest data. And that led to a drop in overall life expectancy for the first time since 1993, particularly among people younger than 65."

"'This is a big deal,' says Philip Morgan, a demographer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill who was not involved in the new analysis."

"'There's not a better indicator of well-being than life expectancy,' he says. 'The fact that it's leveling off in the U.S. is a striking finding.'"

"Now, there's a chance that the latest data, from 2015, could be just a one-time blip. In fact, a preliminary analysis from the first two quarters of 2016 suggests that may be the case, says Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the National Center for Health Statistics, which released the new report."

Amazon To Open Convenience Store With No Lines

"Amazon says it is opening a new food and convenience store that doesn't have a checkout line."

"Instead, the company envisions customers at the Amazon Go store picking up whatever they want off the shelves — then simply walking out with it. The items are automatically billed to their Amazon accounts."

"Details about how the technology actually works are sparse. 'We used computer vision, deep learning algorithms and sensor fusion much like you'd find in self-driving cars,' a narrator says in a video from Amazon. 'We call it Just Walk Out Technology.'"

"The 1,800-square-foot retail store in Seattle will offer ready-made meals and some grocery basics, according to the website. The company says it is testing the store with its own employees and plans to open to the public in 2017."