May 3, 2011
In an age when even the president has to offer up his birth certificate to prove he was born in the U.S., it's probably not going to be easy to convince skeptics that the world's best known terrorist leader is dead. Perhaps a little DNA fingerprinting will do the trick in this bit of the Global War on [...]
November 18, 2010
If you’re exploring your 23andMe Health results for the first time, the sheer amount of information may seem overwhelming. There are nearly 200* reports connecting your genetics to various health conditions and traits. There is an active community of other customers asking and answering questions related to [...]
September 16, 2010
Genetic testing is not a concept that most people encounter outside of popular TV shows and so when you hear about services such as 23andMe’s, you might be wondering what exactly it is you’re getting. Even after you’ve signed up and have your data back, you might not know where to start exploring or how [...]
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 [...]
April 28, 2010
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system, causing unpredictable and varying symptoms that differ from person to person. About 1 in 700 people in the United States is affected by the disease. Because MS often runs in families, it's thought that there is a [...]
October 9, 2009
A segment of chromosome 14 folded to reveal a fractal curve using Origami. Designed and folded by Jason Ku. Photo by Erik Demaine. How do you get three billion pairs of As, Cs, Ts and Gs—about six feet worth of DNA—into the nucleus of a tiny cell? Most students of biology would answer by saying [...]
October 2, 2009
Through the millennia wave after wave of migrants - often in the form of invading armies – have descended upon the British Isles. The first people to arrive after the Ice Age were hunter-gatherers who followed their prey north from southern Europe about 12,000 years ago. The Celts came from central [...]
September 25, 2009
For as long as humans have lived in complex communities, cities and civilizations, they have divided and classified their societies. Those divisions have been based on age, gender, appearance or - in many cases - occupation. In many traditional societies artisans would share the same social status; as would [...]
June 22, 2009
Each one of us carries in our cells the vital genetic data, compliments of our parents, that code for many of our traits and attributes. Whether it's our eye color, height or the ability to consume dairy products, the variations in our genes contribute to making us 'one of a kind'. Unfortunately, these [...]
April 29, 2009
I spent the better part of my undergraduate career lugging around massive biology textbooks. General biology, genetics, embryology: It didn't matter, they all weighed a ton. I pored over endless chapters of text, highlighting the important sentences, always wishing for more photos, more diagrams, more [...]
