The opium poppy is famous for its ability to produce painkilling molecules. Now, by sequencing its genome, a team of scientists from China, the United Kingdom and Australia uncovered several events in the poppy’s history that, together, could have led to the evolution of its opium-producing behavior.
When adopting a new canine family member at a shelter, many people choose a dog based on the breed or breeds labelled on its cage. But new research using genetic testing shows that shelters don’t always correctly label dogs, meaning the pointer you just adopted could actually be more of a labrador.
DNA from a 22,000-year-old fossilized panda skull suggests an entirely separate lineage of giant pandas once roamed the area that is now southern China.
It was the kind of lawsuit that would only happen in Florida.
The pitch was a skincare routine designed especially for me, genetically optimized to give me the skin I was “born to have.” The reality was decidedly more itchy, flaky, and red.
On the internet, a week is a lifetime—especially when it’s the opening week of Avengers: Infinity War. Unlike seemingly everyone else, I’ve yet to see the Marvel blockbuster, an admission that is likely enough to inspire my colleagues at io9 to greet me at my desk in the morning with pitchforks. It also means running…
I was crawling around on the floor, chasing my cat, Avalanche, as she artfully wriggled away from me over and over again to gnaw at the piece of tape I had stuck to her gray and white fur. Avalanche had unwittingly become a victim of journalistic inquiry: I wanted to explore the latest fad in consumer DNA testing,…
When investigators revealed last week that a genealogy website had played a major role in catching alleged Golden State Killer Joseph James DeAngelo, a 72-year-old former police officer, some people worried what that meant for DNA privacy. The Golden State Killer terrorized California in the 1970s and 1980s, killing…
In what will undoubtedly be the largest genomic sequencing effort of all time, an international consortium of researchers is organizing a massive effort to collect and sequence the DNA of Earth’s 1.5 million known eukaryotes, the domain of organisms that includes animals, plants, and fungi.
Guided by the work of Rosalind Franklin, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the the twisted-ladder structure of DNA in 1953, a finding that gave rise to the modern field of molecular biology. It was by understanding DNA’s double-helix form that science was able to begin unravelling the many mysteries of genetic…
Ever since researchers first discovered that bacterial immune systems could be hijacked to selectively change DNA in living creatures, CRISPR gene-editing technology has been limited by the boundaries of the cell wall. CRISPR allows scientists to cut and paste little bits of DNA, swapping out even single letters of…
The Bajau people of Malaysia and the Philippines are renowned for their free-diving abilities, often working eight-hour shifts in search of fish and other sea critters. Underwater sessions can last upwards of two minutes, with accumulated daily totals of breath-holding often reaching five hours. New research suggests…
Recent advancements in science and medicine have put cures within reach for diseases that have long plagued humankind.
Christopher Columbus reached the New World in 1492, but some experts say Polynesian explorers beat him to it. There’s little evidence to support this fringe theory, but scientists have pointed to the presence of sweet potatoes, a plant thought to be native to the Americas, in the South Pacific as potential proof. A…
India’s eighth largest state is seeking to build a blockchain-based DNA database of all 50 million of its citizens.
When the gene-editing technology CRISPR first made a splash back in 2012, it foretold a future in which curing diseases might simply involve snipping out problematic bits of genetic code. Of course, innovation is rarely so straightforward. As incredible as CRISPR is, it also has some pretty sizable flaws to overcome…
In the late 1990s, as Esteban Burchard was finishing up his medical training at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, newspaper headlines blared warnings about what appeared to be a growing asthma epidemic.
For nearly two years now, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been quietly giving the go-ahead to a handful of crops that have been genetically engineered using CRISPR. Editing the DNA of people and animals may be controversial, but when it comes to plants, the agency has taken the stance that as long as the…
Last May, a journal published results suggesting that the revolutionary gene-editing technique CRISPR might actually be quite dangerous. The paper caused a bit of turmoil in the biotech world, which is looking to CRISPR as a major disease-fighting tool of the future. But it didn’t take long for the study to attract…
Last summer, a study claiming that the gene-editing technique CRISPR might actually be dangerous whipped labs around the biotech world into a frenzy. Researchers found that when they used CRISPR to cure blindness by changing DNA in mice, it resulted in not just a few but more than a thousand unintended effects on…
