Free Republic

EXCERPT Good-naturedly referencing his friend Andrew Young—who marched with King and is prominent in the film—early in his speech, Clinton told the sold-out crowd, “I saw Andy earlier today and I said, ‘Andy, I just watched Selma. Were you ever that thin?’ (eliciting thunderous laughter) and he said yes, he was, that they were dodging so many bullets in droves they all used to be thin.” As he continued to speak, he got decidedly more serious. “If you haven’t yet, go see the movie Selma,” he insisted, “and you will see the enormous pressures imposed on the King family and...

Nearly two decades after the ancient skeleton called Kennewick Man was discovered on the banks of the Columbia River, the mystery of his origins appears to be nearing resolution. Genetic analysis is still under way in Denmark, but documents obtained through the federal Freedom of Information Act say preliminary results point to a Native-American heritage.The researchers performing the DNA analysis “feel that Kennewick has normal, standard Native-American genetics,” according to a 2013 email to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for the care and management of the bones. “At present there is no indication he has a...

In Austen Heinz’s vision of the future, customers tinker with the genetic codes of plants and animals and even design new creatures on a computer. Then his startup, Cambrian Genomics, prints that DNA quickly, accurately and cheaply. “Anyone in the world that has a few dollars can make a creature, and that changes the game,” Heinz said. “And that creates a whole new world.” The 31-year-old CEO has a deadpan demeanor that can be hard to read, but he is not kidding. In a makeshift laboratory in San Francisco, his synthetic biology company uses lasers to create custom DNA for...

There were no witnesses to the gruesome murder of a South Carolina mother and her 3-year-old daughter inside a busy apartment complex four years ago. But a new technology that can create an image of someone using DNA samples left at crime scenes might bring police closer to catching the killer. Reston, Va.-based Parabon Nanolabs, with funding from the Department of Defense, has debuted a breakthrough type of analysis called DNA phenotyping which the company says can predict a person's physical appearance from the tiniest DNA samples, like a speck of blood or strand of hair. The DNA phenotyping service,...

Just two hours of exposure to diesel exhaust is enough to cause significant damage to the human body, a new UBC study concludes. The study, led by Dr. Chris Carlsten, looked at how pollution particles affect the way genes are expressed in the body. Sixteen non-smoking adult volunteers with asthma were put in an enclosed booth about the size of a standard bathroom, and made to breathe diluted and aged exhaust fumes equal to the air quality along a Beijing highway, or a busy port in British Columbia. Carlsten says the impact of the pollution "exceeded our expectations." "Quite rapidly,...

Today, 23andMe announced what Forbes reports is only the first of ten deals with big biotech companies: Genentech will pay up to $60 million for access to 23andMe's data to study Parkinson's. You think 23andMe was about selling fun DNA spit tests for $99 a pop? Nope, it's been about selling your data all along. Since 23andMe started in 2006, it's convinced 800,000 customers to hand over their DNA, one vial of spit at a time. Personal DNA reports are the consumer-facing side of the business, and that's the one we're most familiar with. It all seems friendly and fun...

Russia's richest man has revealed that he bought US scientist James Watson's Nobel Prize gold medal, and intends to return it to him. Steel and telecoms tycoon Alisher Usmanov said Mr Watson "deserved" the medal, and that he was "distressed" the scientist had felt forced to sell it. The medal, awarded in 1962 for the discovery of the structure of DNA, sold for $4.8m (£3m) at auction. The medal was the first Nobel Prize to be put on sale by a living recipient....

Let’s suppose that James Watson, who co-discovered the structure of DNA together with Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin, is wrong about race and intelligence. And let’s even suppose that it was immoral for him to say that this fact “makes me despair about Africa.” Does this abolish Dr. Watson’s free speech rights? No. Well, does James Watson merit the merry media witch hunt that has followed him, ever after making that Verboten remark, so that he is now known as “the disgraced scientist James Watson”? I do not think so. Media witch hunting is a fundamental wrong, no matter who...

DNA Analysis Report released Monday night following the grand jury’s decision not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown shows Brown’s DNA was on the interior driver’s-side door handle of Wilson’s police vehicle. That evidence matches with Wilson’s story that Brown reached inside the car and attacked him.

Partial Ingredients For DNA And Protein Found Around Star NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered some of life's most basic ingredients in the dust swirling around a young star. The ingredients - gaseous precursors to DNA and protein - were detected in the star's terrestrial planet zone, a region where rocky planets such as Earth are thought to be born. The findings represent the first time that these gases, called acetylene and hydrogen cyanide, have been found in a terrestrial planet zone outside of our own. "This infant system might look a lot like ours did billions of years ago,...

Rapid DNA technology makes it easier than ever to grab and store your genetic profile. G-men, cops, and Homeland Security can't wait to see it everywhere. Robert Schueren shook my hand firmly, handed me his business card, and flipped it over, revealing a short list of letters and numbers. "Here is my DNA profile." He smiled. "I have nothing to hide." I had come to meet Schueren, the CEO of IntegenX, at his company's headquarters in Pleasanton, California, to see its signature product: a machine the size of a large desktop printer that can unravel your genetic code in the...

In high school biology, we are taught that there are three types of life: eukaryotes (that's us, and most everything else we often think of as life), bacteria, and archaea (extremophiles and other very primitive life forms). But some scientists are pretty sure that there are entirely different, undiscovered lifeforms that could be prevalent on Earth, and they remain undescribed because we're not good at looking for them. In a new paper published in Science, Tanja Woyke and Edward Rubin of the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute note that "there are reasons to believe that current approaches [to discovering...

Ebola, Marburg viruses edit genetic material during infectionFiloviruses like Ebola "edit" genetic material as they invade their hosts, according to a study published this week in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. The work, by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the Galveston National Laboratory, and the J. Craig Venter Institute, could lead to a better understanding of these viruses, paving the way for new treatments down the road. Using a laboratory technique called deep sequencing, investigators set out to investigate filovirus replication and transcription, processes involved in the virus...

Genetics will determine whether a person infected with Ebola dies, scientists claimed today. A new study has found DNA could be the key to tracking the deadly effects of the virus which has ravaged West Africa. The World Health Organisation revealed nearly 5,000 people have died from the disease, which has devastated Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. A team of scientists at Washington University believe their study has identified genetic factors behind the mild-to-deadly range of reactions to the virus.

Monica Lewinsky was "in love" with former President Clinton, the disgraced former intern revealed Monday. "Sixteen years ago, fresh out of college … I fell in love with my boss," the infamous former White House staffer told a business conference Monday during an eye-opening speech about her devastating experience in the public eye following the revelation of her affair with Clinton — her first public address in 13 years. "Overnight I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one. I was patient zero," she said, according to reporters present at the Forbes magazine "30 Under 30"...

And so one of the West’s greatest, most enduring mysteries, which has spurred numerous failed attempts to crack it, continues. It’s the saga of Jack the Ripper, who committed at least five grisly murders in East London in the autumn of 1888 and then, poof, disappeared, never to be identified.

Geneticist specialists from the Institute of Biological Problems of the North, Far-East Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, are reconstructing the picture of Eurasia colonization by the Slavs. According to the researchers’ opinion, the Slavonic men and women jointly developed the territory of the south of contemporary Russia. However, after the 9th century, women used to stay at home, and colonization of the east and north was mainly performed by men. This conclusion was made by geneticists through analyzing variable consecutions of DNA of mitochondria and of some sections of Y-chromosome with representatives of 10 Russian populations from the Stavropol...

In the genetic history of our species, the mamas outnumber the papas. A new study in Investigative Genetics reports that females have made a bigger contribution than men. By studying the DNA of 623 males from 51 populations, the researchers found more genetic diversity in the DNA inherited from mothers than they did in the DNA inherited from fathers. At first glance, these results could be taken to mean that there used to be more women than men. But if you know anything about history, it makes more sense to blame reproductive habits: In many cultures, more women reproduced than...

The FBI is preparing to accelerate the collection of DNA profiles for the government's massive new biometric identification database. Developers of portable DNA analysis machines have been invited to a Nov. 13 presentation to learn about the bureau's vision for incorporating their technology into the FBI's new database. So-called rapid DNA systems can draw up a profile in about 90 minutes. The Next Generation Identification system, or NGI, the successor to the FBI's criminal fingerprint database, is designed to quickly ID crooks through facial recognition, iris matching, tattoo cross-checks and vocal recordings, among other unique traits. But critics say aggregating...

Vital DNA evidence has finally uncovered the identity of notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper. The man behind the grisly killing spree in London’s East End has been unveiled as Aaron Kosminkski, a 23-year-old Polish immigrant who ended up dying in an asylum. A blood soaked shawl, purchased by author Russell Edwards, led to the breakthrough when a scientist matched DNA evidence left on it to descendants of Kosminski. Mr Edwards, 48, from Barnet, north London, was "captivated" by the murder mystery and had been investigating it in his spare time, but had come to the conclusion it could never...

Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, two men who have sat on North Carolina's death row for three decades for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl, were set free this week after the discovery of new DNA evidence.

NORFOLK Her attacker broke in through a back door while she was sleeping. He tied her up and held a knife to her throat. He said he wasn't going to rape her, that he was hungry and just wanted money. But he did rape her. A month later, he returned in the middle of the night to the same house near Ocean View. He bound the woman and her teenage daughter with duct tape and raped the girl. Norfolk police investigated, but the case went cold. Two years later in Kuwait, in 2010, an Army captain was showering when a...

Do you think the NSA surveillance issue is bad? Wait until you hear about the U.S. government’s DNA tracking program. A 2007 law mandated the collection of blood samples from the heels of newborns to screen for diseases, but an updated part of the law could be used to track children in education. newborn screening The program, Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act of 2007, was reauthorized by the House of Representatives this past June and the Senate in January 2014. The original sponsor was Democratic U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd and was signed in 2008 by President Obama. The purpose of...

DNA sequences reveal Ebola’s spread and mutation The virus was not recognized in West Africa until March of this year, however, when the first case was confirmed in Guinea. Gire said the West African epidemic likely began after a single zoonotic event — in other words, transmission of the virus from an animal to a person. Gire said his study shows that more than 300 mutations have occurred since Ebola began infecting people in Sierra Leone. Every time a virus passes from one person to another, it is likely some mutations will occur, though not all of them will be...

The earliest people in the North American Arctic remained isolated from others in the region for millennia before vanishing around 700 years ago, a new genetic analysis shows. The study, published online Thursday, also reveals that today's Inuit and Native Americans of the Arctic are genetically distinct from the region's first settlers. Inuit hunters in the Canadian Arctic have long told stories about a mysterious ancient people known as the Tunit, who once inhabited the far north. Tunit men, they recalled, possessed powerful magic and were strong enough to crush the neck of a walrus and singlehandedly haul the massive...

DNA Was Created as a Reservoir for the Information of Life Secular scientists claimed in the 1970s that chimp genomes are 98% similar to humans, and it was apparently verified by more modern techniques. But that estimate actually used isolated segments of DNA that we already share with chimps—not the whole genomes. The latest comparison that included all of the two species’ DNA revealed a huge difference from the percentage scientists have been claiming for years.

Oetzi, the prehistoric man frozen in a glacier for 5,300 years, could have been infertile, a new study suggests. Genetic research, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, also confirms that his roots probably lie in Central Europe. Oetzi's body was found in the melting ice of the Schnalstal glacier in the Italian Alps in 1991. Examination of his remains has already revealed the Copper Age man almost certainly died as a result of a fight. The assessment is based on the presence of an arrowhead that is lodged in his back and extensive cuts to his hands. The...

Stone Age man found frozen in the Alps some 5,300 years after he was murdered under mysterious circumstances may have been a childless social outcast, a new study showed. Italian anthropologist Franco Rollo studied fragments of the DNA belonging to Oetzi, as the mummy has come to be known, and found two typical mutations common among men with reduced sperm mobility, the museum that stores the "iceman" said. A high percentage of men with such a condition are sterile. "Insofar as the 'iceman' was found to possess both mutations, the possibility that he was unable to father offspring cannot be...

Scientific evidence refuting the theory of modern humanity’s African genesis is common knowledge among those familiar with the most recent scientific papers on the human Genome, Mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomes. Regrettably, within mainstream press and academia circles, there seems to be a conspicuous – and dare we say it – deliberate vacuum when it comes to reporting news of these recent studies and their obvious implications.

OAKLAND -- Wednesday was a day off from politics for former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who spent the morning in Oakland with babies, small children and their parents, talking about talking. It was the local kickoff for the "Too Small to Fail" campaign, an early childhood education effort designed to let parents know that talking is teaching when it comes to the youngest children.

The Newborn Screening Saves Lives Reauthorization Act is waiting in the US Senate for a vote. Last week, before the House voted on it, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann went to the floor of the House and said parent consent should be required. But it passed without consent requirements. Now, the U.S. Senate is planning to vote on the Houseʼs newborn screening bill and send it to the President. The Senate wants to hotline it, but we want to stop it unless it has written informed parent consent for the government storage, use, analysis, and sharing of newborn DNA. Call your Senators...

In the Altay Mountains of southern Siberia, some 200 miles from where Russia touches Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan, nestled under a rock face about 30 yards above a little river called the Anuy, there is a cave called Denisova. It has long attracted visitors. The name comes from that of a hermit, Denis, who is said to have lived there in the 18th century. Long before that, Neolithic and later Turkic pastoralists took shelter in the cave, gathering their herds around them to ride out the Siberian winters. Thanks to them, the archaeologists who work in Denisova today, surrounded by...

It looked bad for homeless alcoholic Lukis Anderson when DNA evidence tied him to a Silicon Valley millionaire's 2012 murder. But when Anderson's lawyer proved that paramedics who had treated him on the streets of downtown San Jose inadvertently transferred his DNA to the Monte Sereno murder scene, she didn't just clear him. The case is believed to be the first in California and perhaps the nation in which DNA evidence was shown to have falsely placed an innocent person at the scene of a crime, lending credibility to defense lawyers who struggle to convince jurors to view DNA evidence...

Chimp DNA Mutation Study--Selective Yet Surprising by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. * A popular evolutionary belief is that humans and chimps shared a common ancestor 2 to 6 million years ago. Apparently, evolutionists still aren't too sure of their own theory: now they've more than doubled that timeline. Scientists just published a study describing chimp DNA mutation rates and compared a number of cherry-picked genomic regions to human—and this research doubled their evolutionary timeline.1 However, the selective data did not account for the vast chasm of documented genome differences that were not included in the analyses. Heritable mutations are the rare...

Former Clinton aide Kiki McLean defended Hillary Clinton's claim that she was "dead broke" and "struggled" after leaving the White House by saying that the Clintons "have a life and a set of expectations that are different" from middle class Americans. McLean made the comments on CNN:(VIDEO-AT-LINK)"I suppose when you heard that comment you knew full well that that was going to be fodder for the Republicans," the CNN host said today referring to the comments Clinton made in an interview that aired last night. "Mrs. Clinton used the word 'houses' -- the plural version, which many Americans would hear...

When politicians have trouble spinning their own glories, that’s a problem. So it was bizarre that Hillary Rodham Clinton, asked at a forum in April about her legacy at the State Department, had trouble articulating it. That feeds into a narrative — awaiting her memoir on Tuesday — that she may have been glamorous as secretary of state but didn’t actually accomplish much. In fact, that’s dead wrong, for Clinton achieved a great deal and left a hefty legacy — just not the traditional kind.... No, her legacy is different. For starters, Clinton recognized that our future.... More fundamentally, Clinton...

Hillary Clinton drew a "Harry Potter" sized line of fans waiting to get an autographed copy of her new memoir "Hard Choices" at a Manhattan bookstore today. Hundreds of Hillary fans have camped out for hours, many overnight, outside the Union Square Barnes and Noble store to get one of the coveted wristbands which would allow them access to her first book tour stop today. By the time people were allowed to inside the store around 8:30 a.m., the line was wrapped around an entire city block -- up Park Avenue, around 18th Street, and all the way to Broadway.

Reporters who showed up to cover the first signing of Hillary Clinton's book tour in Manhattan on Tuesday faced strict restrictions that led to what one veteran correspondent called a "media mutiny." Barnes & Noble Corporate Communications Director Carolyn Brown addressed the assembled reporters and briefed them on the restrictions. Brown said Clinton would "hold the book and pose" before going "behind the desk" to sign copies. "No questions: She's not taking any questions," Brown said. "She's not making remarks." Many reporters griped about the situation. Print reporters were told they would be kept at least 20 feet away from...

A 2005 Senate trip to Canada opened Hillary Clinton’s eyes to the dangers of climate change and inspired her to push for aggressive actions to fight it, the former secretary of state wrote in her book released Tuesday. Clinton described flying over the Yukon Territory with three Republican senators and seeing large areas of spruce trees that had been killed by beetles driven north temperature changes. “A tribal elder recounted how he had returned to a lake where he had fished as a boy only to find it dried up,” Clinton said in her second book, “Hard Choices.” “I met...

'Junk' DNA Keeps Your Heart Beating by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. * A new research study has shown that large regions of the human genome, once thought to be useless junk, work to keep your heart functioning properly.1 When these areas of the genome malfunction, cardiovascular failure is often outcome, showing the importance of every piece of God's handiwork. The human genome is composed of more than just DNA sequences that produce proteins. In fact, only about 2% to 3% of the genome directly encodes information specifying the sequence of proteins. Despite this small percentage, about 80 to 90% of the...

Hillary Clinton touted the economic growth seen during the last two Democratic presidencies during a speech before the New America Foundation on Friday, and she warned that the U.S. risks falling behind global competitors if policymakers do not do more to revive the middle class by generating broad-based economic growth. Clinton, a former secretary of state who's eyeing a presidential bid in 2016, praised both President Obama and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, for their economic stewardship. And she contrasted their years in the White House with the tenure of former President George W. Bush, saying eight years of...

One of the oldest human skeletons in North America has been discovered by a team of international scientists in an underwater Yucatán Peninsula cave............... ...................... The girl's skeleton is exceptionally complete because of the environment in which she died -- she ended up in the right water and in a quiet place without any soil. Her pristine preservation enabled our team to extract enough DNA to determine her shared genetic code with modern Native Americans," she added. The skeleton, which is now covered in water, is estimated to be between 12,000 and 13,000 years old, suggesting Naia lived in the...

Remains Found in Mexico Connect Earliest Settlers With Continent's Natives She was just a teenager when she died alone in the dark. The scientists who analyzed her bones said Thursday that she is the oldest nearly complete, genetically intact human skeleton in the New World. Her remains—discovered deep within a flooded cave in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula—cement the connection between the earliest settlers of the Americas and modern Native Americans. A unique genetic marker exhumed from her 12,000-year-old skeleton offers evidence that the first hunter-gatherers who crossed the Bering Sea from northeast Asia on a now-submerged territory called Beringia belonged to...

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute, or TSRI, in San Diego, California, have created a new living organism whose genetic code includes six letters, instead of four, and that added pair of DNA letters, researchers say, is “not found in nature.” In a study, published in Nature on Wednesday, scientists described the new bacterium as the first life form to contain artificial genetic building blocks. According to them, the new finding could lead to organisms that might help scientists develop medicines or industrial products that are impossible to produce using cells containing only natural genetic code, The New York Times...

Researchers for the first time created microbes containing artificial DNA, expanding the universal genetic code that guides life. The advance one day could lead to new antibiotics, vaccines and other medical products not possible with today's bioscience. In a report published Wednesday in Nature, the scientists said they created two additions to the normal genetic code, and then prompted bacteria to incorporate these pieces of man-made DNA with few ill effects. "The cells recognized it as natural," said chemical biologist Floyd Romesberg at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., who led the research group.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, bioengineers at The Scripps Research Institute in the San Diego neighborhood of La Jolla said they had successfully inserted two synthetic molecules into the genome of an Escherichia coli bacterium, which survived and passed on the new genetic material. In addition to the naturally occurring nucleotides adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine, which form the rungs of DNA’s double-helix structure, the bacterium carried two more base-pair partners, which study authors have dubbed d5SICS and dNaM. For more than a decade, scientists have been experimenting with so-called unnatural base pairs, or UBPs, saying they...

We leave traces of ourselves everywhere we go, thanks to DNA. But an artist's new invention that claims to let you erase all evidence of your personal data could change that. ‘Invisible' is a spray from BioGenFutures that claims to delete 99.5% of your DNA from everyday objects. This includes the data you leave behind via your saliva, fingernails and strands of hair. The spray comes with a mysterious partner product called Replace, which apparently obscures the 0.5% of data remaining, allowing users total anonymity. The ‘genetic privacy' project is the brainchild of artist and BioGenFutures founder Heather Dewey-Hagborg, who...

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Minnesota would be permitted to retain blood samples from newborn babies under a bill that passed the state House Thursday, potentially restoring a valuable research tool despite privacy concerns from some parents. The bill that passed 69-58 would let parents opt out of having their child’s sample kept. Lawmakers also added an amendment banning sale of the samples and related test results and data. The bill now moves to the Senate. Supporters say keeping the samples can save lives by helping researchers develop tests for new disorders. Opponents say they amount to giving ownership of...

New York (Reuters) - How can creatures as different in body and mind as present-day humans and their extinct Neanderthal cousins be 99.84 percent identical genetically? Four years after scientists discovered that the two species' genomes differ by a fraction of a percent, geneticists said on Thursday they have an explanation: the cellular equivalent of "on"/"off" switches that determine whether DNA is activated or not. :snip: Calling the work "pioneering," and "a remarkable breakthrough," paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London said in an interview that the HOXD gene finding "may help to explain how these ancient...

An email from Monica Lewinsky was omitted from the Clinton library’s latest document dump for privacy reasons. Every two weeks this spring, the National Archives has been releasing documents from Clinton’s presidency through The William J Clinton Presidential Library & Museum in Little Rock, Ark. Included in a list of withdrawn/redacted documents, midway through a batch of documents concerning Gen. Wesley Clark, is an email from Monica Lewinsky’s Pentagon email address. Vaguely referenced as concerning a “medical record,” the omitted email is listed as four pages long.