January 22, 2012
Today we're announcing the creation of the 23andMe Ancestry Ambassadors group, composed of ancestry enthusiasts in the 23andMe Community. 23andMe customer CeCe Moore and Product Manager Mike Macpherson, PhD will lead the new group. Building the best possible personal genetics service has always been [...]
March 11, 2011
by Mike Macpherson, Shirley Wu, and Joanna Mountain A young Hadza hunter From just flecks of bone and specks of DNA, scientists have been able to piece together a story of the origin of our species. That story, by most accounts, begins in eastern Africa 100-200,000 years ago. After all, multiple lines of [...]
May 7, 2010
Latin America is the home of dances as varied as the stately rumba and the racy salsa. It ranges over searing deserts, rocky heights, and sultry jungles. Perhaps it should not be a surprise, as a new study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows, that its people run [...]
October 15, 2009
Here’s how it goes for me: a few afternoons a year, usually when I haven’t slept or eaten right, but sometimes for no apparent reason, I begin to sense a pressure behind my left eyebrow and to feel queasy. By now I know what’s coming, and I resign myself to another miserable evening and a coming day or [...]
August 24, 2009
Nearly a year ago today, the Spittoon reported that researchers had figured out how to pick a known person's DNA out of a database containing genetic information for up to 200 unidentified individuals. The feat made it possible to determine, for example, if a particular suspect's DNA was present in a mix of [...]
May 26, 2009
Malaria is one of the leading causes of death in the developing world, claiming nearly a million victims each year. The great majority of them are African children below the age of five. The illness is caused by a single-celled parasite called Plasmodium that is transmitted by mosquito bites to humans. In a [...]
May 14, 2009
Mexican flu virus genetics has been much in news lately; how about a look at Mexican human genetics for a change? A new article from researchers at Mexico's National Institute for Genomic Medicine (INMEGEN) examines genetic diversity across the nation, and argues that, in order to conduct studies of common [...]
January 14, 2009
Pop Quiz: What do women who eat cereal for breakfast each morning have in common? They get a full day's supply of 11 essential vitamins and minerals. They enjoy better sex lives than women who don't eat cereal for breakfast. They are more likely to give birth to male children. They make buying [...]
November 20, 2008
You've heard the family legends — or maybe you haven't. Now 23andMe has a new ancestry feature that can show you what your genes have to say about where your ancestors originated. This new feature, called Global Similarity: Advanced, shows you which populations from around the world you are genetically [...]
October 14, 2008
As talks began Saturday at Cold Spring Harbor's first "Personal Genomes" conference, the first half of which I blogged on here, several leading explorers of the strange new world of "structural variation" in the human genome, such as Evan Eichler and Mike Snyder, shared some of their latest findings. You [...]
