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While medical science and the health community have huge problems and too often focus on death management rather than enhancing life, it is breakthroughs like this that give hope that all is not lost. A medical miracle of hearing for this end-of-February Feel-Good Friday.A novel gene therapy approach has given five children who were born deaf the ability to hear. The method, which overcomes a roadblock presented by large genes, may be useful in other treatments, according to researchers.The work, conducted in Fudan, China, by a team co-led by Zheng-Yi Chen at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and Harvard...

As the UN commemorates World Day of Social Justice on February 20, we’re taking a look at one of the key challenges the world is facing in the coming decades: the gradual and largely irreversible shift towards an older population. According to the United Nations Population Division, the number of persons aged 65 and older is expected to double over the next three decades, reaching 1.6 billion in 2050. As the following chart shows, Asia is at the forefront of this trend, with Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan expected to have the highest share of people aged 65 and...

Ask why, exactly, we need to bring woolly mammoths back to life after 4,000 years, and the answers become numerous and hideously predictable.To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum in “Jurassic Park,” just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should — even if that something is “cool.”Ben Lamm and Eriona Hysolli recently took to Newsweek to announce that they and their team at Colossal Biosciences are bringing the woolly mammoth back to life. This is not a pie-in-the-sky pseudo-sci fi dream that might happen at some undefined future date. “Our first mammoth calves will be born in 2028,” they declare.The plan...

<p>When Aleisha Goodwin, an estate coordinator at the Clark County Public Administrator's Office, reached out to Las Vegas Review-Journal investigative reporter Jeff German in March 2022 to describe the problems she and her co-workers said they were experiencing with their boss, she said they were at their breaking point.</p>

A healthy frog has been spotted with a tiny mushroom sprouting from the side of its body, the first time such a growth on live animal tissue has been observed. Naturally, it completely stunned scientists. While fungi invasions are fairly common in the small-animal world, this growth appeared to be very different to the zombie parasitic types that spell bad news for their hijacked hosts. The fungus-accessorizing Rao's Intermediate Golden-backed Frog (Hylarana inter-media) was discovered by scientists out on a nature walk at the foothills of the Kudremukh Range in India's Western Ghats mountains. Despite this species being on the...

The consumer genome sequencing company 23andMe is a sinking ship – and its CEO is conducting the orchestra. As Wired reports, 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki was chipper on a February 7 earnings call despite the company's abysmal revenue report that led to its stock being devalued to below 75 cents per share, down a whopping 93 percent from the $16.04 when it first went public. "We are an unusual company," Wojcicki said, per Wired, during the investor call. That response very much undersells the circumstances that may lead to 23andMe spinning off its consumer DNA testing and therapeutics wings into...

The rise of farming in late Stone Age Europe was no smooth transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyles but a bloody takeover that saw nomadic populations wiped out by farmer-settlers in a few generations, a new study has found.In fact, twice in just a thousand years, the population of southern Scandinavia was entirely replaced by newcomers to the area, whose remains bear next to no trace of their predecessors in DNA profiles, analyzed by an international team of researchers."This transition has previously been presented as peaceful," explains study author and palaeoecologist Anne Birgitte Nielsen of Lund University...Using a technique called shotgun sequencing,...

A portrait of Beethoven painted in 1820 by Karl Joseph Stieler. (Karl Joseph Stieler/PD) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ One stormy Monday in March, 1827, the German composer Ludwig van Beethoven passed away after a protracted illness. Bedridden since the previous Christmas, he was attacked by jaundice, his limbs and abdomen swollen, each breath a struggle. As his associates went about the task of sorting through personal belongings, they uncovered a document Beethoven had written a quarter of a century earlier – a will beseeching his brothers make details of his condition known to the public. Today it is no secret that one of...

In autumn 2023, a hacker called Golem posted on a well-known message board for cybercriminals, announcing a trove of data stolen from 23andMe, one of the biggest names in at-home DNA testing. Golem boasted about having access to the accounts of people of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage who had sent their DNA to 23andMe, and offered to sell it to whoever was prepared to pay. "tailored ethnic groupings, individualized data sets, pinpointed origin estimations, haplogroup details, phenotype information, photographs, links to hundreds of potential relatives, and, most crucially, raw data profiles". The purported ability of Jews to blend in – to...

The depopulation bomb imploding in China is more powerful than ever according to shocking new figures just published by Australia's Victoria University in Melbourne. It just seems like last month [It was just last month, Steve — editor] that I reported for you that Chinese women seemed to be voting against strongman Xi Jinping's return to True Communism™ with the only means available to them — their uteri. Live births were down in 2023 by another 500,000 under 2022's dismal figure. That puts the People's Republic fertility rate nearly at 1.0, or about half of the 2.1 required just to...

In the left’s mythology, there are white people and “people of color.” White people are bad; “people of color” are good. Racism is bad unless you’re mocking, stereotyping, and discriminating against white people, which is simply redress for centuries of white supremacy. White people are always oppressors in every case, and “people of color” are always noble victims. One of the hosts of the cringefest known as “The View,” however, got a rude awakening Tuesday, in the form of a reminder that reality is not really that simple. Fox News reported Thursday that Sunny Hostin, one of the far-left harridans...

An aquarium and shark lab in Hendersonville is expecting a miracle birth any day -- with some exciting new additions. The Aquarium and Shark Lab by Team ECCO in downtown Hendersonville has an expectant stingray named Charlotte. But this pregnancy isn't just any normal pregnancy -- and because of that, staff thought the swelling they started to see in Charlotte in September might be cancer. Why? Because there was no possible way for her to have become pregnant -- or so they thought -- as there were no male sting rays in the tank. 'Miraculous birth' expected from stingray with...

"The View" host Sunny Hostin was shocked to discover her family's hidden history in a new episode of the PBS documentary show, "Finding Your Roots." The documentary show researches prominent figures' family histories through historical records and DNA testing. On the February 6 episode, show host Henry Louis Gates Jr. revealed one of Hostin's ancestors on her maternal side was likely involved in the slave trade in colonial Spain. Her third great-grandfather also "owned at least one human being," he said.

Watch as Otzi, a 5000-year-old mummy, is brought to life and preserved with 3D modeling. (Aired February 17, 2016)He was stalked, attacked and left to die alone. Murdered more than 5,000 years ago, Otzi the Iceman is Europe's oldest known natural mummy. Miraculously preserved in glacial ice, his remarkably intact remains continue to provide scientists, historians, and archeologists with groundbreaking discoveries about a crucial time in human history. But in order to protect him from contamination, this extraordinary body has been locked away, out of reach, in a frozen crypt—until now. NOVA joins renowned artist and paleo-sculptor Gary Staab as...

The continued embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion in STEM combined with a broad decline in academic standards is producing a generation of scientists who are less capable than their predecessors, warned some scientists in recent interviews with The College Fix. From easier math classes in high school to the elimination of standardized tests to extreme grade-inflation to DEI tropes that elevate lived experiences and ways of knowing over facts and data, the trend represents a pressing problem for science professors working to protect STEM and preserve its standards and meritocracy. Alex Small, chair of the physics and astronomy department...

A 70-YEAR-OLD man revealed to cops on his deathbed that he was one of Japan's most wanted fugitives before he died. The man claimed to be Satoshi Kirishima, a radical extremist behind bombings in the capital who had been on the run for 49 years.

CNN) — A world first in rhinoceros reproductive health could save northern white rhinos from extinction, scientists said Wednesday. The team at the BioRescue project successfully impregnated a southern white rhino via in vitro fertilization (IVF), according to a press release, creating a possible path for restoring the northern white rhino species. Northern white rhinos are critically endangered and the only two remaining rhinos, Najin and Fatu, are infertile females that live under constant surveillance in Kenya

As part of their research published in Communications Biology, they also identified the earliest known person with Jacob's syndrome (characterized by an extra Y chromosome—XYY) in the Early Medieval Period, three people with Klinefelter syndrome (characterized by an extra X chromosome—XXY) across a range of time periods, and an infant with Down Syndrome from the Iron Age.Most cells in the human body have 23 pairs of DNA molecules called chromosomes, and the sex chromosomes are typically XX (female) or XY (male), although there are differences in sexual development. Aneuploidy occurs when a person's cells have an extra or missing chromosome....

The remains of the last known victim of the Green River Killer have been identified as a Washington State teen – though investigators say there may still be other unsolved cases linked to the infamous murderer. The partial remains were identified as belonging to Tammie Liles, of Everett, the King’s County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO) announced. “With this identification, there are no other unidentified remains associated with the Green River Case,” the sheriff’s office said. The incomplete set of bones and teeth were first discovered in 2003, when serial killer Gary Ridgway – known as the Green River Killer – led...

Pete Mongilardi’s wife, Patricia Perrine, comforts their daughter, Julie Sims, as they talk about the man they lost more than 40 years ago. Bill Tiernan/The Virginian-Pilot The bones were broken and weathered, their edges softened by three decades of tropical rain: four pieces, the largest about 3 inches, tip to tip. They were mixed in the silty loam of a Vietnamese hillside with the wreckage of a Navy jet. Most of the debris had been dragged off by scavengers, but what remained included pieces of belt, parachute and boot sole. The pilot had not ejected.A team sifting through the...