December 20, 2012
Take a moment to look back at the ten most interesting and significant genetic findings of 2012 or at least the ones that drew our attention. In the last 12 months we’ve seen huge strides in genetic research giving us new insight into serious conditions such as Alzheimer’s as well as new treatments for [...]
August 31, 2012
Soon children will be filling their backpacks with new notebooks and pencils and piling into yellow school buses. Even if your school days are long past, you need not be left behind. Learning is life-long, and you can continue your education using 23andMe's short animated guides to human prehistory. [...]
November 30, 2011
Pinworms—small worms that infect the intestines—are the most common worm infection in the United States. Although all people are over 99.9% genetically identical, the small amount of diversity that does exist between individuals tends to track with ethnicity. This is probably pretty obvious—an [...]
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 [...]
October 16, 2009
Previously in The Spittoon, we discussed two papers that identified genetic variants associated with hemoglobin levels in circulating blood. But blood consists of much more than hemoglobin, and it is responsible for much more than just transporting oxygen. This week Nature Genetics published the results of [...]
April 15, 2009
Over the past decade, there has been no shortage of studies focused on the relationship between Neanderthals and our own species, Homo sapiens. Researchers have dug deep into the fossil record and our genomes to uncover how closely related we are to the Neanderthals, whether we interacted with them, and even [...]
March 6, 2009
Throughout the course of human evolution, there have been plenty of firsts. Small changes in our genetic code have laid the groundwork for our bipedal gait, our large brains, and our ability to speak complex languages. There are countless genes throughout the human genome that distinguish us from our [...]
July 22, 2008
Last week in the Spittoon we reported on a new study that identified an interesting genetic trade-off — a genetic variant known that has one effect on a person's vulnerability to malaria, and the opposite on susceptibility to HIV infection. The "Duffy negative" version of the gene, which is common among [...]
