Rosie Redfield spat in a tube and mailed it to a Mountain View, California outfit called 23andMe. A month later, the University of British Columbia geneticist and MOOC instructor received the results by email.
Health
Listen, Read, Watch
Tom Hudson is a busy guy. Few have contributed more to our understanding of how the human genome works — and how to map it, using ‘haplotypes’ — than this congenial native of Arvida, Quebec. .
There’s hardly a facet of drug action that isn’t determined in some way by our DNA — by our genome. On a recent trip to Vancouver, I visited the offices and labs of the Canadian Pharmacogenomics Network for Drug Safety.
Have you ever popped the recommended dose of an over-the-counter analgesic, and it did absolutely nothing? Or perhaps you suffered a life-threatening adverse reaction. If so, you’re in large company.
7
Diana Daunheimer and her husband Derek were a typical young couple pursuing their dreams — raising kids and growing good food at their Alberta homestead. But in 2008, a nastier crop sprouted around her property.
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The slow-food movement has reached the sun-baked, Bolivian altiplano. Here, small-scale producers are making the most of scarce water supplies, ample sun and local expertise to grow food at the top of the world.
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Imagine what it would be like to have your home water supply morph into a fire hazard — the liquid flowing from your tap liable to explode if you light a match.
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Inka Milewski was a marine biologist, not a public health researcher or epidemiologist, when she received a phone call from worried residents of her community. She took up that call. Had no choice. It was something she had to do.
Midwives catch babies. The “mid” part of the word is derived from the German mit, or with. The French phrase for midwife is “sage femme,” or wise woman.
Cerro Posokoni towers over the town of Huanuni, on the eastern slopes of the Andes, in the Bolivian department of Oruro, like an upside-down ice cream cone. Thousands of miners pick away at its entrails each day, among them children.
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When ten “tech” divers travel to Bikini Atoll for a week’s adventure in paradise, preparing to feast their eyes on the most famous collection of sunken nuclear warships in the world, the couldn’t guess what would happen next.
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In the summer of 2014, several hundred people gathered at a fracking “Day of Protest” in Kent County, between Moncton and Miramichi — Elsipogtog First Nations territory.
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Thirty years have come and gone since the end of the American War – as the Vietnamese call it – and its toxic aftermath lingers on.
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The next time you buy roses for your honey, consider this: The cut flowers in your Valentine’s bouquet were fumigated for insects and mildew, then drenched with preservatives for the long flight north.
Judging from this latest voice transmission, it seems that human beings are poisoning themselves and their planet — transforming the very chemistry of their blue-green home.
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Human beings are deeply dependent on motorized machines to move themselves around. Trillions of these things now choke a vast and growing network of so-called “roads,” getting into deadly accidents and polluting the planet’s atmosphere.
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In this final chapter in our series, Christine Hamilton and I head off to a fishing settlement called Lushonga, in search of a woman named Josie, who suffers from an advanced case of AIDS.
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The third in a series of voicescapes from a visit to Bumbire Island, in Southwest Lake Victoria, Tanzania … Dale Hamilton and I travel to nearby Kinagi Island to visit a big fishing camp.
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Bumbire Island sits on the northern tip of a sliver of an archipelago in southwest Lake Victoria, in Tanzania, East Africa. Nature on and around Bumbire is gorgeous—but the hardscrabble fishing camps scattered along its shores—and those of nearby rocky islets—are a different story.
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Bumbire Island sits on the northern tip of a sliver of an archipelago in southwest Lake Victoria, Tanzania, East Africa. The landscape is gorgeous, but hardscrabble fishing camps tell a different story.
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[…] Toxic pollution is not just an urban problem, as the purple haze hovering over Alberta’s lovely Lochend district suggests. Past GPM stories have focused