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In 2018 the world woke up to gene editing with a storm of controversy over twin girls born in China with genetic changes deliberately introduced by scientists – changes they will pass on to their own offspring. Genetic modification (GM) has been with us for 45 years now, but the new system known as CRISPR…
Everything is sexual. Every joke is dirt, every pun a double entendre, every four letter word a part of the anatomy. Ads and magazine covers are embellished with full breasts and bulging pecs. And we all know which sites are making money on the Internet. Humans are obsessed with sex. But why? And what happens…
What makes us human? Why are we the only animals who wear clothes, surf social media, and send robots to Mars? It’s all because we’ve learnt to talk: yet remarkably, we still don’t know how we did it. SPEECH! suggests an answer that’s been hiding in plain sight – a simple yet radical shift that turned our…
What is humour? Why do we laugh? And why is the root of a good joke almost always error? Good jokes, bad jokes, clever jokes, dad jokes ― the desire to laugh is universal. But why do we find some gags hilarious, whilst others fall flat? Why does explaining a joke make it less amusing…
Human beings have succeeded as the most dominant species on earth in large part due to our need to connect and cooperate. It was our ability to socialize and connect that catapulted our species to phenomenal heights of innovation, through collaboration and specialization. This drive has fine-tuned our unconscious perception of faces, facial expressions, body…
From the Siberian permafrost to balmy California, scientists across the globe are working to resurrect all kinds of extinct animals, from ones that just left us to those that have been gone for many thousands of years. Their tools in this hunt are both fossils and cutting-edge genetic technologies. Some of these scientists are driven…
As influential today as when it was first published, The Selfish Gene has become a classic exposition of evolutionary thought. Professor Dawkins articulates a gene’s eye view of evolution – a view giving centre stage to these persistent units of information, and in which organisms can be seen as vehicles for their replication. This imaginative, powerful, and…
How much of our fate is decided before we are born? Which of our characteristics is inscribed in our DNA? Weiner brings us into Benzer’s Fly Rooms at the California Institute of Technology, where Benzer, and his asssociates are in the process of finding answers, often astonishing ones, to these questions. Part biography, part thrilling scientific…