Relics of the big bang

Astronomers have discovered two clouds of gas some 12 billion light-years away that appear to preserve the primordial conditions of the universe in the minutes after the big bang. The clouds contain just hydrogen and its isotope deuterium, making them “the first examples to fit precisely” into what scientists think the early universe was like, University of California astronomer Jason […]

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Gene editing: A step toward ‘designer babies’

Gene editing

“Turns out the rumors are true,”. Word has spread through the scientific community that “researchers in China have successfully edited the genomes of human embryos.” Those rumors were confirmed when a team from Sun Yat-sen University published laboratory results revealing that they had crossed an ethical red line, using a gene editing tool on embryos to modify the gene responsible […]

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The Prominence and Plight Of Girls in the Juvenile Justice System

The number of juveniles in the nation’s criminal justice system has been in decline for years. California and New York have closed some of their largest and most troubled juvenile detention facilities. Missouri has recently been credited with doing a better job of caring for its most troubled children, further limiting the state’s population of teens in punitive settings. But […]

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Could we talk with whales?

Human-like sounds made by a captive beluga whale suggest that cetaceans could learn to mimic our voices, and perhaps even converse with us. Researchers at the National Marine Mammal Foundation first noticed in the 1980s that one of their whales was attempting to copy the speech patterns of his handlers and they began recording his human-like vocalizations. Recently, they analyzed […]

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