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The world's largest stem cell society this week signaled a willingness to reconsider a long-standing restriction on laboratory efforts to grow and study human embryos. In new guidelines, the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) also spotlights a possible alternative to using embryos that might be less ethically fraught: emerging methods to model stages of human development with stem cells. ISSCR's influential guidelines previously put the culture of human embryos beyond 14 days postfertilization in its most restrictive category three: "prohibited research activities." The new guidelines, drafted by a task force of scientists and ethicists, omit longer embryo culture from this category and encourage a public discussion about allowing it.

In a World View opinion column published in Nature, a Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine researcher calls for animal-human embryo research to proceed – but only with strong animal protections in place. So-called “chimera” research raises the hope of producing human organs in genetically modified large animals, such as pigs and sheep, offering a potential solution to the persistent shortage of human organs for transplantation.

On May 11, 2016, the Berggruen Philosophy and Culture Center invited Yuval Noah Harari, a professor of history at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of the international bestseller “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” to deliver a talk on “The New Inequalities” at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Prior to the talk, Harari was interviewed by BPPC director Daniel A. Bell. This is an edited transcript of the interview.

Humanity has become a dominant force in shaping the face of Earth1–9. An emerging question is how the overall material output of human activities compares to the overall natural biomass. Here we quantify the human-made mass, referred to as ‘anthropogenic mass’, and compare it to the overall living biomass on Earth, which currently equals approximately 1.1 teratonnes10,11. We find that Earth is exactly at the crossover point; in the year 2020 (± 6), the anthropogenic mass, which has recently doubled roughly every 20 years, will surpass all global living biomass. On average, for each person on the globe, anthropogenic mass equal to more than his or her bodyweight is produced every week. This quantification of the human enterprise gives a mass-based quantitative and symbolic characterization of the human-induced epoch of the Anthropocene. Estimates of global total biomass (the mass of all living things) and anthopogenic mass (the mass embedded in inanimate objects made by humans) over time show that we are roughly at the timepoint when anthropogenic mass exceeds total biomass.

A new map of the human brain could be the most accurate yet, as it combines all sorts of different kinds of data. This might finally solve a century of disagreements over the shapes and positions of different brain areas.

A majority of children would be conceived in laboratories instead of naturally in developed countries in two decades from now, says a leading academic at the Stanford University. Henry Greely, Director at the Center for Law and the Biosciences, Stanford University, believes that the process of conception could even become stigmatised in the future, the Independent reported.