Because hammerhead sharks give birth to live young, studying their embryonic development is much more complicated than harvesting some eggs and watching them develop in real time.
Human embryos are far more likely to die than come to term, an evolutionary trait seen across species. Laws granting personhood at conception ignore built-in embryo loss, with potentially grave consequences.
Adults today may have grown up dreaming they would live to see working jet packs and robot assistants but few people imagined it would be possible to create life without reproductive cells.
An unknown number of people have lost their dreams of parenthood because of storage disasters at fertility clinics. These experts note poor government oversight and the need for stronger regulation.
Plus, how a new wave of South African romcoms is reimagining Johannesburg. Listen to episode 17 of The Conversation Weekly podcast.
Researchers have grown the first human-monkey hybrid embryos as well as mouse embryos in artificial wombs late into development. These biomedical breakthroughs raise different ethical quandaries.
Parthenogenesis, a form of reproduction in which an egg develops into an embryo without being fertilized by sperm, might be more common than you realized.
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