It turns out the human genome can be snipped and tucked and manipulated surgically, just like any organ Ever since the human genome wasmapped in 2001, scientists have been finding new and novel ways to manipulate it: intervening to remove offending genes or DNA sequences that can contribute to disease, and fixing mutations that can affect people’s health. As remarkable as those advances have been, however, they have only occurred on one dimension—the linear sequence of DNA. Now scientists report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencestheir success in manipulating the genome in 3D. The human genome that’s squeezed…

The growing list of the ways in which climate change is reshaping life on Earth has an unusual new addition: shorter bee tongues. Over the past 40 years, warmer, drier weather has reduced flower populations in some regions of the Rocky Mountains in North America, forcing bees to work harder to find nectar. At the same time, bee tongues in those regions have got shorter, according to a study published in Science[1]. The change to the bees’ anatomy probably arose because longer-tongued bees tend to be picky eaters, dining mainly on nectar from deep flowers, says lead author Nicole Miller-Struttmann, an…

In deciding to ban religious arbitration in provincial family law, Premier Dalton McGuinty has done a great disservice to a number of religious groups in Ontario, and nothing to safeguard the interests of Muslim women. By apparently succumbing to the polemics of anti- sharia groups that confused cultural patriarchies, bad-faith husbands, and incompetent imams with the totality of what arbitration under sharia could offer, the Premier has missed a real opportunity to support Muslim women in Canada and human-rights activists the world over. Let's be clear: With the ban on sharia arbitration, there will be no positive gain for Muslim women. They are in exactly the…

An anti-Muslim group cannot post ads on buses in Washington state showing photos of wanted terrorists and wrongly claiming the FBI offers a $25 million reward for one of their captures, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a claim by the American Freedom Defense Initiative that King County violated its First Amendment right to free speech by refusing to post the advertisements on buses. The group — whose leader, Pamela Geller, organized the Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest in Texas that exploded in violence in May — has similar bus ads in other…

  came into town on a highway from Atlanta, the shining symbol of a young and prosperous and growing New South. It was February 2013 and I was making the first of several trips to Albany, Georgia, in the southwestern part of the state, sixty miles from the Alabama border. Jimmy Carter’s evangelism took root here. It is the home Ray Charles evokes when he says Georgia’s on his mind. Stately antebellum plantations line the highway into town, rare historic gems that still stand because this area avoided direct fire during the Civil War. Today, millionaires and billionaires host lavish retreats…