May 9, 2012
Nature vs. nurture is a question scientists and non-scientists alike have grappled with since the earliest days of human history. One concept we use to describe these two complementary forces is "heritability", or the proportion of variation in the development of a disease or trait in a population that's due [...]
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 [...]
January 27, 2009
If Facebook is starting to take over your life, maybe your genes are partly to blame. Researchers from UC San Diego and Harvard University have shown that certain aspects of a person’s social network – how many people consider that person a friend, the likelihood that two of a person’s friends are [...]
August 6, 2008
For years I believed that every Mexican restaurant my family took me to had some kind of problem with their dishwashing machine. Why else would the food always taste like soap? No one around me seemed to notice, so I just assumed that everyone else liked the taste of dirty dishwater in their [...]
