The Year of Paying Attention Guitarist Allan Holdsworth has died. My first impulse was to call my old friend Jack, but he’s dead, too. As college freshmen sharing a tiny Boston University dorm room rumored to have been built on the blueprints of a prison, Jack and I blasted Holdsworth…

In times of war and instability, historic governments worked hard to ensure the food security of their people. But the recent pandemic has shown how vulnerable our food systems are to shocks from pandemics, politics and conflicts. Words: Athlyn Cathcart–Keays Illustration: Yann Bastard When The Community Farm (TCF) saw its…

From 2017 on, the 4thpillar Technologies (i.e. 4thTech) have been striving to enable digital data and document exchange from blockchain wallet A to wallet B. To be able to exchange digital data carefree over the internet, without the danger of identity and cyber data theft can be beneficial to many…

Photo illustration, source: Mladen Antonov/Getty Images Reengineering Life is a series from Future Human about the astonishing ways genetic technology is changing humanity and the world around us. In2008, Timothy Ray Brown became the first person to be cured of HIV. The year before, he received a bone marrow transplant…

Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich from Pexels The fastest vaccine the FDA has approved was the Ebola DNA-based vaccine that took about five years. For Covid-19, in less than a year, we already have two candidate vaccines — mRNA-based vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna — awaiting approval this year or early…

Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich from Pexels The fastest vaccine the FDA has approved was the Ebola DNA-based vaccine that took about five years. For Covid-19, in less than a year, we already have two candidate vaccines — mRNA-based vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna — awaiting approval this year or early…

Photo by Suhyeon Choi on Unsplash Introduction. Teen pregnancies deprive our young girls of the opportunity to pursue their education and attain their goals. It also exposes them to major health hazards. According to the WHO, “Pregnancy and childbirth complications are the leading cause of death among girls aged 15…

Annie Spratt on Unsplash. Receive this newsletter every Friday morning! Sign up here: https://synbio.substack.com/ Reach out on Twitter. A Gene Therapy, Tested on Dogs, Has Issues For CRISPR-based gene therapies to work, you first need to squeeze a Cas protein and guide RNAs into a teeny tiny virus. …

Pictured: Laced with meaning. Source: Pexels In the year of COVID-19, many things that are really scientific questions have become absurdly politicized. There’s hydroxychloroquine, which as an anti-malarial drug really shouldn’t be the topic of much political conversation, but somehow is. …