Shayna Svihovec (2014 Human Biology and Society BA major) is one of three Jessie Alpaugh Senior Prize winners awarded this year in the Disability Studies minor. With her project, titled “Straddling the Line Between the Deaf and Hearing Communities in a Hearing Dominated World,” she plans to add knowledge to the field of deaf and disability studies. She hopes to eliminate…
These days many consumers rely on the “Nutrition Facts” labels on the back of food products to count calories, check fat content and decide if what they’re eating is healthy. These labels aren’t perfect, though, and with that in mind, the Food and Drug Administration has a rule under consideration to revamp the labeling requirements. The rule’s main goal is…
Dolly the sheep enjoyed a brief and highly publicized life as the first mammal cloned from an adult cell before succumbing to lung disease in 2003 at age 6. But an attempt to patent Dolly, and lay commercial claim to animals produced by cloning, survived much longer. But that nearly 10-year-long saga also appears to have ended last week when…
Counsyl, a Silicon Valley company that screens prospective parents for their risk of passing on rare inherited diseases, has expanded its genetic testing service to assess your inherited risks for breast, ovarian, prostate, and pancreatic cancers. The expanded testing, which arrived on the heels of $28 million in new funding raised from Goldman Sachs and others, comes in the midst…
Researchers at the Natural History Museum at University of Oslo, Norway, were among the first in the world to start analyzing sperm cells to learn more about bird evolution and behavior. “To understand sexual infidelity in species, interpreting DNA is not enough. We also need to look at the shape and behavior of the sperm cells. Sperm research has opened…
Do you remember your first birthday? How about what you ate for breakfast weeks ago? For most people, such events slip through the sieve of memory, never to be retrieved. Now, the first study of its kind in mice suggests that the brain may clear away that old information in the process of forming new memories. Studies in mice have…