September 5, 2012
Correction: Ouch! We mistakenly listed the wrong answer to the last question in the quiz. It has been corrected. Populations are more similar now than they were 500 years ago due to migration and intermixing. The correction did not change the results for the winner. Okay students, pencils down! Last [...]
August 22, 2012
Did they really “do it?" We’re not talking about actress Kristen Stewart and her “Snow White and the Huntsman” director; We’re talking about Neanderthals and modern humans. Without meaning to get all People magazine on you, the question about whether modern humans and Neanderthals hooked up has [...]
August 20, 2012
This is a guest post from a 23andMe customer, who took a journey to learn about her ancestry. By Alyssa Gradstein I took the 23andMe DNA test to find out who I was. I was adopted and ethnically mixed. I can’t count the number of times in my 30 years I’ve been asked: “What are you?” It [...]
March 1, 2012
Finding Your Roots Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is a 10-part series in which the Harvard scholar will delve into the genealogy and genetics of famous Americans. Gates uses history and science, including 23andMe’s ancestry tools, to explore race, family and identify in each episode. With [...]
February 22, 2012
Data from the 2010 census showed that about 13% of people living in the United States self-identify as African American, but from a genetic point of view, ethnicity isn't so black and white. Most African Americans have genetic ancestry tracing back to both Africa and Europe but the exact proportion can vary [...]
February 14, 2012
Sickle Cell Celebrities A number of famous individuals have suffered from sickle cell anemia including Miles Davis, perhaps the most famous jazz musician to have lived (some consider his platinum-selling album Kind of Blue to be THE jazz album), and Tionne 'T-Boz' Watkins, a singer and founder of the [...]
August 19, 2011
It started innocently enough with a simple question from his daughter. “Where did our family come from?” (Image from Larry Vick's blog) For 20 years Larry Vick has been trying to answer that question. His first source was a chart drawn up by an uncle, but since then Vick has turned to old Census [...]
June 2, 2010
Nasopharyngeal cancer (NPC) arises in the upper part of the throat, behind the nose. It is rare in most areas of the world—affecting only about 1 in every 100,000 people—but about 25 times more common in southern China, earning it the name "Cantonese Cancer." NPC rates are also high in southeastern [...]
May 10, 2010
The author during her time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya. As a Peace Corps volunteer teaching in Kenya 25 years ago, I was fascinated by the cultural, linguistic, and physical differences among the people of eastern Africa. One of our Kenyan trainers took us to a "boma" where his tall, [...]
February 18, 2010
Group of hunters from the Ju/’hoansi tribe in the Namibian Bush/ Stephan C. Schuster Researchers from Penn State University, the University of New South Wales in Australia, and the Baylor College of Medicine have sequenced the genomes of four individuals from different groups of the click-speaking San of [...]
