May 15, 2013
If you haven’t yet heard, college is expensive. Darn expensive. Thankfully, there are now free online universities for those of us daunted by the hefty price tag attached to traditional university courses. These online universities, such as Coursera and Udacity, provide quality courses taught by [...]
April 11, 2013
If you saw adoptee Sheridan* on the street, you might wonder -- as she does -- about her ancestral origins. You could guess a few things, but would you have guessed she has Jewish ancestry? It turns out a small percentage of her ancestry is Ashkenazi, a fact she learned recently from her 23andMe Ancestry [...]
April 5, 2013
23andMe has a new design for our website. We’d like you to take a peek. With input from our customers, we created a cleaner and more personalized layout that highlights some of the features you know and love, and adds a few new ones to boot. While customers still have access to the same breadth of [...]
March 14, 2013
We at 23andMe hear this question a lot when the topic of personal genetic testing comes up. We each have our own answer, but enterprising PBS NewsHour correspondent Spencer Michaels simply went out and asked. It’s helpful to hear from people on both sides of the issue about why they would or wouldn’t [...]
March 11, 2013
There’s much to recommend in Carl Zimmer’s profile of David Reich in Discovery Magazine, not least of which are details on our favorite extinct human cousins, Neanderthals. While Neanderthals are the rock stars of the piece, Zimmer also gives a good primer on human evolution, ancient migration out of [...]
February 27, 2013
Last week we put up a quiz in the spirit of Jeopardy! after host Alex Trebek made use of 23andMe in one of his game clues. The time was up last night to make your entry. So here are the answers to our Homage to Jeopardy! Quiz. Remember you didn’t have to get everything correct to be entered into the [...]
February 15, 2013
Can 23andMe sample my dead relatives and why do you use spit to extract my DNA? Inquiring minds want to know, or at least a lot of our customers do. There really are no dumb questions and if you have something to ask, we’ve probably heard it before. 23andMe has a lot of resources for folks trying to [...]
January 24, 2013
We first met Sheridan* in the fall of 2010. As an adoptee, she was curious about her DNA and what 23andMe might be able to tell her. With the help of old friends and some new ones on 23andMe, Sheridan learned about her global origins, which include an African-American father and a mother of European descent, [...]
December 24, 2012
If you could just get your Christmas tree to spit into a tube and extract some DNA, you might learn a lot about your holiday decoration. For starters, you might be able to tell where it originated. Plant genetics, like animal genetics, is influenced by geography. A team of Douglas fir tree researchers, [...]
November 21, 2012
Thanksgiving -- it’s a time for friends, family and, of course, food. Thanks to modern science, we now know quite a lot about the foods that grace our holiday tables. Over the last few years, scientists have worked hard to sequence many common Thanksgiving foods: turkeys, potatoes, corn, apples, wine [...]
