Seventeen years ago, when I was pregnant with my daughter, I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes. I assumed it would go away after delivery, as it does for many people. But it didn’t. Today, like about 1 in 3 American adults, I live with prediabetes, marked by elevated HbA1c—a quiet signal that my blood sugar regulation is off. What’s more troubling is that most people with prediabetes don’t know they have it. And the consequences aren’t trivial: about 70% of…

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Among my favorite characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is King T’Challa, the title character in Black Panther (2018) who appears in other MCU movies. T’Challa was portrayed by the brilliant Chadwick Boseman—even if you are not a fan of the MCU, you might know Boseman from his portrayal of Jackie Robinson in 42 or of Thurgood Marshall in Marshall. He worked on Black Panther while terminally ill, somehow keeping this fact largely unknown and keeping it from stopping…

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Misuse and overuse of antimicrobials have led to a global health crisis: antimicrobial resistance (AMR), including multidrug-resistant superbugs. Common misconceptions that contribute to the problem have proven difficult to dispel; for example, 30% of Europeans believe that antibiotics are effective against colds (Eurobarometer 2022). One important arm of the multipronged strategy to tackle AMR is surveillance, but the current focus on clinical settings is too narrow. Microbes – including bacteria carrying antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) – are everywhere, and environments…

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When food shopping, I tend to opt for organic products. These often have an extra label touting their GMO-free status, since organic farming prohibits the use of genetically modified organisms. That includes organisms created with “new genomic techniques” (NGTs) like CRISPR. But there’s a paradox: plants bred using conventional mutagenesis (i.e., random mutagenesis with chemicals and radiation) are generally allowed in organic farming, even though these techniques are more likely than modern gene editing to produce unintended mutations in the…

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Chronic stress is not just unpleasant; it degrades human health in several ways. One effect of chronic stress is increased susceptibility to depression, which itself exerts damaging effects on health and wellbeing. Neither of these conditions is deeply understood, and so perhaps it is unsurprising that the link between chronic stress and depression is unclear. A recent paper in Nature provides interesting and useful clues to that link, in a set of experiments that journey from effects of antidepressants to…

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I am regularly awestruck by the feats accomplished by our fellow animals. Here’s one that might not seem particularly praiseworthy: eating your body weight in a single meal. This is regularly achieved by ticks, and that’s a second reason you might want to stop reading, but hear me out. A tick gorges itself on blood (perhaps yours) until it has ballooned to at least ONE HUNDRED TIMES its pre-meal body weight. How is this even possible? Specifically, how does this…

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Autism is extremely heterogeneous. It is shaped by a complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors, which have been studied for decades, making RFK Jr’s pledge to determine “what has caused the autism epidemic” by September highly questionable. Some worry that the effort will be biased towards vaccine-autism theories, which have been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked. The strongest known contributors to autism risk are genetic, but there is reasonable evidence that environmental factors during pregnancy can affect autism risk in offspring (and,…

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Last month, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex. Snippets are not the place for discussing legal rulings and their ramifications, but I want to focus on one quote from the decision: “the concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man”. Such simplicity might be convenient in terms of legal clarity but is at odds with the reality of human biology. Biological sex is…

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mRNA vaccines have been administered billions of times worldwide and their importance was underscored by the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman “for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19”. Nonetheless, mRNA vaccines have been the subject of controversy, some of it rooted in misinformation. For example, false claims and conspiracy theories about mRNA vaccines altering DNA gained traction, spreading fear of long-term…

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My experience of human pregnancy, while vicarious, has long associated pregnancy with uncomfortable body heat. This is both interesting and worrying to me, and so I was curious to read this new paper in Cell Reports: “Prolactin modulation of thermoregulatory circuits provides resilience to thermal challenge of pregnancy.” The title grabbed me (as a good title should), especially the phrase “resilience to thermal challenge of pregnancy.” I know that body temperature increases in early pregnancy, and I assumed it stays…

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