Earlier this year, scientists from Stanford University concluded that a strange skeleton known as the Atacama Mummy belonged to a human girl whose physical malformations were the result of several severe genetic mutations. A team of international experts is now questioning these findings, and accusing the scientists…
In the 1980s, scientists learned that all humans living today are descended from a woman, dubbed “Mitochondrial Eve,” who lived in Africa between 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. This discovery, along with other evidence, suggested humans evolved from a single ancestral population—an interpretation that is not standing…
An excavation of a million people’s genes has provided some interesting clues to how several common psychiatric disorders might arise, including major depression and schizophrenia. And it’s also highlighted connections between some mental illnesses and other health problems, including heart disease.
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.
Consumer DNA testing is going to the dogs. A Canadian testing company has been accused of sending back supposedly human ancestry results on a faux sample that actually came from a chihuahua named Snoopy, CBC News reported Wednesday. Remarkably, it’s the second company reported to have been fooled by doggy DNA in…
It was the kind of lawsuit that would only happen in Florida.
A test developed by scientists in the UK and US might someday be able to pinpoint the men most likely to get prostate cancer. A new study published Monday in Nature Genetics suggests the test can detect the one percent of men who are genetically most vulnerable to developing prostate cancer, a leading cause of cancer…
As the last Ice Age was coming to an end, and as the first settlers arrived in North America, two distinct populations emerged. One of these groups would eventually go on to settle South America, but as new genetic evidence shows, these two ancestral groups—after being separated for thousands of years—had an…
The ties that bind us to our ancestors might be even more influential than we knew, suggests a new study published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics. It found that the grandchildren of women who took a certain hormone-mimicking drug before the 1970s were at higher risk of developing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder…
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.
Liza Lizarraga has spent hours combing through paper and digital archives to track her family’s history the old-fashioned way, and she has spit in a test tube to find out what morsels of her family’s history might be revealed by her DNA. In September, though, Lizarraga will walk the same path as her ancestors when she…
Squirrels and other hibernating animals have an almost magical ability to withstand frigid temperatures. New research has uncovered the biological factors involved in keeping cellular structures intact during hibernation—a finding that could eventually be used to preserve human organs prior to transplantation.
Scientists think they’ve stumbled upon a newly discovered mechanism that could explain why some people’s hair turns gray and others become afflicted with patches of unpigmented skin, a rare, stigmatized condition called vitiligo. Their research, published Thursday in PLOS Biology, suggests a gene that regulates the…
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,…
Dog may be man’s best friend, and even genetically similar to humans, to boot, but there are enough key differences that it shouldn’t be too hard to distinguish between human and doggie DNA.
Two years ago, a consortium of scientists, lawyers, and entrepreneurs announced a plan to synthesize an artificial human genome from scratch—an extremely ambitious endeavor that’s struggled to secure funding. Project organizers have now disclosed details of a scaled-down version of the venture, but with a goal that’s…
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…
The identity of the Golden State Killer, a notorious serial killer who terrorized California in the 1970s and 1980s, evaded police for decades. The case went cold. Then, recently, investigators got a major break: A match for what seemed to be a close relative of the killer, uploaded onto a genealogy website.…
Depression is a tricky beast. Symptoms vary widely from person to person, as does the response to treatment. But there’s no question that genetic makeup plays an important role, and understanding the genetic architecture of depression could help us better understand how to treat it.
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.
