Many people long for the good old days when children weren’t penned in with hectic activity schedules and parents ushered them outside to play. Adults, too, often stare out office windows, longing for a few hours in the fresh air and sunshine, away from steel and concrete buildings.

The gift of speech, one of the capabilities that defines humans, defies evolutionary explanations. Even now, a century and a half since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, scientists are no closer to discovering how human language developed.

New research published this month pushes back on the environmentalist claim that climate change destroyed the Viking outposts of Greenland. The study, published last week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, tells of a changing economic climate, not climate change.

Each year an estimated 8 million children are born worldwide with severe genetic disorders. During pregnancy, genetic disorders can impair fetal development and lead to birth defects, but currently no approved medical treatments exist to correct gene mutations before birth.

Now, in a study published on June 26 in Nature Communications, researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Yale universities used a unique gene modification method to correct gene mutations in mice early in embryonic development.

Who would have thought a 9-year-old boy’s school project could mushroom into a frenzied environmental campaign to ban the plastic straw?

Research conducted in 2012 at the University of California, Berkeley, paved the way for using CRISPR-Cas9 technology to genetically engineer animal and human DNA. Scientists soon began touting the gene-editing tool as a marvel with the potential to cure and prevent a wide variety of diseases. But researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute recently published a study in Nature Methods that shows that use of CRISPR may cause a great deal of unintended genetic damage.

The species that evolutionists have pegged as an early human ancestor seems to have more in common with apes, according to a recent analysis of the skeleton of a 3-year-old Australopithecus afarensis.