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SANTA ANA A carjacker from Orange has been sentenced to three years in prison after authorities identified him through DNA he left on a cigarette in the recovered car. Gary Munoz, 30, was arrested, charged and convicted in less than two months, thanks to the county’s RAPID DNA program, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office said in a Tuesday statement. On March 9 at about 3:30 p.m., Munoz approached an idling car in a parking lot off of Imperial Highway in Brea, prosecutors said. A woman was in the passenger seat while the driver was out looking for an ATM...

The question can’t get more personal. Can you give up the rights to your DNA data? The answer is yes. And Larry Guernsey of San Jose knows firsthand. Family intrigue led Guernsey to buy his wife a DNA test kit from Ancestry DNA. “She’s always been interested in genealogy,” he said, noting that his wife had always wondered if she was part Indian. The $99 Ancestry DNA test Guernsey bought as a Christmas present uses a saliva sample to trace family history. “A simple test can reveal an estimate of your ethnic mix,” says the announcer in an Ancestry DNA...

Bennett Greenspan - Are Modern Jews Descended from the Biblical Israelites?

While environmental and inherited factors have well-known roles in cancer development, a new study provides evidence that a third, and until this point scientifically undervalued factor, is at the root of nearly two-thirds of cancer-causing mutations: random and unpredictable errors that occur in normal DNA replication. Cells are constantly regenerating, and every time a healthy cell divides, there are about three random mistakes or mutations in the copied DNA. Most of the time these copying errors are harmless. However, occasionally they occur in a cancer driver gene, which is just “bad luck,” study author Bert Vogelstein, M.D., co-director of the...

Scientists have made a discovery that could lead to a revolutionary drug that actually reverses ageing. The drug could help damaged DNA to miraculously repair and even protect Nasa astronauts on Mars by protecting them from solar radiation. A team of researchers developed the drug after discovering a key signalling process in DNA repair and cell ageing. During trials on mice, the team found that the drug directly repaired DNA damage caused by radiation exposure or old age. 'The cells of the old mice were indistinguishable from the young mice after just one week of treatment,' said lead author Professor...

House GOP would let employers demand workers' genetic test results https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/10/workplace-wellness-genetic-testing/ House Republicans would let employers demand workers’ genetic test results By Sharon Begley @sxbegle March 10, 2017 A little-noticed bill moving through Congress would allow companies to require employees to undergo genetic testing or risk paying a penalty of thousands of dollars, and would let employers see that genetic and other health information. Giving employers such power is now prohibited by legislation including the 2008 genetic privacy and nondiscrimination law known as GINA. The new bill gets around that landmark law by stating explicitly that GINA and other protections do...

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had researchers at Trent University’s Wildlife Forensic DNA Laboratory test the chicken from several fast food chains, including McDonald’s, Wendy’s, A&W, Tim Hortons and Subway. Most of the scores were between 85 and 90 percent chicken DNA. Except at Subway. The oven roasted chicken scored 53.6 percent chicken DNA and the Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki (chicken strips) had just 42.8 percent chicken DNA, according to the CBC Marketplace investigation. ... So what else is in the meat? According to the DNA testing, it’s soy.

Cops caught a suspect Saturday in the murder of Karina ­Vetrano, the beautiful jogger whose brutal strangulation last summer — in the high weeds of Spring Creek Park in Queens — had transfixed the city. Officials did not immediately release the name of the suspect, but sources told The Post he is in his 20s and lives in a housing project in East New York, Brooklyn, a neighborhood just west of her home in Howard Beach. The suspect had been on police radar for a while, sources told The Post.

Authorities say familial DNA was used to solve the 1976 killing of the ex-wife of The Righteous Brothers singer Bill Medley. Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell said Monday that investigators blame Kenneth Eugene Troyer for the slaying. Karen Klaas was strangled with her pantyhose in her home. Investigators say they collected a DNA sample from the coroner and matched it to forensic evidence from the crime scene. McDonnell says investigators ran a forensic sample collected at the crime scene through a state database and found a familial match to identify a close male relative of Troyer’s. Police in California...

oden268 8 months ago · 188k reads New DNA Study Shows Humans Bred With Unknown Species Denisovans interbred with yet another extinct population that lived in Asia more than 30,000 years ago — one that is neither human nor Neanderthal.Updated genome sequences from two extinct relatives of modern humans suggest that these ‘archaic’ groups bred with humans and with each other more extensively than was previously known.The ancient genomes, one from a Neanderthal and one from a member of an archaic human group called the Denisovans, were presented at a meeting on ancient DNA at the Royal Society in...

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department investigators on Monday will announce that they have solved the 1976 slaying of Karen Klaas, a Hermosa Beach mother of two and the ex-wife of singer Bill Medley of The Righteous Brothers. The case was solved through the use of “familial DNA,” which identified the killer, the department said in a statement Friday. Detectives, forensic and law enforcement officers will hold a news conference on Monday, the 41st anniversary of the crime. Klaas, 32, was found in her Hermosa Beach home on Jan. 30, 1976. She had been sexually assaulted, choked and left unconscious. In...

I began working in what I call Writing Mode which is where I go when consumed with the writing of a new book Not too long ago, I began a science fiction novel, which has always been a dream of mine, and since I finally broke through the fiction wall last year with my book, America’s Trojan War, I thought it was time. I even had a plot that had been rattling around in my mind for years. I began working in what I call Writing Mode, which is where I go when consumed with the writing of a new...

Despite Impossible Odds M-Vac Succeeds January 24, 2017 • 5 Likes • 0 Comments Collect touch DNA from a rock. Collect male touch DNA that is mixed into a shirt soaked with female victim blood. Collect DNA from a brick. Collect touch DNA from a rope. Collect DNA from clothing that has been submerged for 8-10 hrs. Collect DNA from clothing that is decades old. Collect skin cells from a cement block. Collect DNA from the edge of a burnt blanket. Collect touch DNA from a victim's pillowcase. These are all scenarios in which investigators have applied the M-Vac System...

The Obama administration has dropped a controversial proposal that would have required all federally funded scientists to get permission from patients before using their cells, blood, tissue or DNA for research. The proposal was eliminated from the final revision of the Common Rule, which was published in the Federal Register Wednesday. The rule is a complex set of regulations designed to make sure federally funded research on human subjects is conducted ethically. The revision to the regulations, set to go into effect in 2018, marks the first time the rule has been updated in 26 years. The initial proposal that...

MI6 agents could be asked to volunteer DNA as part of a renewed bid to discover how Gareth Williams died, the head of the Metropolitan Police confirmed yesterday.

Bill Clinton self-proclaimed secret love child is appealing to borrow Monica Lewinsky's notorious stained dress to conduct DNA testing. Danney Lee Williams Jr., 30, believes that the former White House intern's famous blue dress contains the key to proving that he is the former president's illegitimate son. Williams has long claimed that he is the son of Clinton who met his prostitute mother while she was working on the streets of Little Rock, he claims. The 30-year-old's claims garnered international attention in 1992, as then-Arkansas Gov Clinton was gearing up to run for president. Just last month, Williams had threatened...

New evidence found by scientists has started to suggest that the people living on the islands of Melanesia could have human DNA the world has never seen. The theory is that the DNA does not come from a Neanderthal or Denisovan (which are the two ancient species we most closely relate humans with). Scientists believe that they come from a new undiscovered species that derived from the South Pacific, northeast of Austrailia.

The four dimensional human genome defies naturalistic explanations by Robert Carter Published: 6 October 2016 (GMT+10) Ecoli-bacterium Figure 1: A comparison of the control of transcription in E. Coli (left) with the Linux call graph (right). The bacterial cell is able to control many protein-coding genes (green lines at bottom) with relatively few controls (yellow and purple lines). Linux, while obviously a result of intelligent design, falls far short in that it requires many more high-level instructions to control relatively few outputs. From Yan et al. 2010.1 The human genome is the most complex computer operating system anywhere in the...

Bill Clinton was getting a foot massage. “We were on the terrace of his apartment,” recalled the 20-something intern at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum who was massaging Bill’s feet. “We had a meal served from 42 [the restaurant in the Little Rock library] — ­vegan stuff like kale salad. “He often invites girls like me who work at the library to his apartment for a glass of red wine and a massage,” the intern said in an interview for this book. “He likes his neck and shoulders massaged because he gets knots in his muscles. But...

A month after the complex DNA-mixture evidence was tossed from the prosecution’s case, an upstate New York man was acquitted of murder by a judge. Oral “Nick” Hillary, now 42, was accused of strangling his ex-girlfriend’s 12-year-old son Garrett Phillips in 2011. Hillary was indicted in 2014, and went on trial this month. The prosecution’s case featured DNA-mixture interpretation produced by the probabilistic genotyping software called STRmix. But Judge Felix Catena threw out that genetic just before the bench trial began, finding it did not pass the threshold for scientific validity – and that it was “unduly prejudicial to the...