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Scientists have found the oldest DNA evidence yet of humans’ biological history. But instead of neatly clarifying human evolution, the finding is adding new mysteries. In a paper in the journal Nature, scientists reported Wednesday that they had retrieved ancient human DNA from a fossil dating back about 400,000 years, shattering the previous record of 100,000 years. The fossil, a thigh bone found in Spain, had previously seemed to many experts to belong to a forerunner of Neanderthals. But its DNA tells a very different story. It most closely resembles DNA from an enigmatic lineage of humans known as Denisovans....

Full Title is "Holiday Celebration: Robot Turtles, Poop-Snooping DNA Detectives" “Robot Turtle Will Help Underwater Archeologists Inspect Shipwrecks,” for example, has some obviously worthwhile things to point out about the development of autonomous unmanned underwater vehicles to explore dangerous environments more cheaply and safely than humans can manage. The saving grace for this report from The Robot Safari in the London Science Museum, however, is the effort the announcement goes to – and trouble the designers obviously did as well – to not only build an autonomous underwater vehicle that swims like a turtle, but justify having done so (paddle-like...

The A3/02 strain combines the two most common HIV strains in Guinea-Bissau and develops into AIDS within five years, up to two-and-a-half years faster than either of its parent strains, said Angelica Palm, one of the scientists behind the study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. This type of strain, a recombinant, appears when a person becomes infected by two different strains, allowing DNA to fuse and create a new one.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Nov. 28 (UPI) -- Humans lived for thousands of years in small, isolated populations and resulting inbreeding shaped the course of human evolution, a U.S. researcher says. Research suggests the severe inbreeding may have created many health problems and the small populations were likely a barrier to the development of complex culture and technologies, NewScientist.com reported Thursday. David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston -- who has sequenced the genome of Neanderthals and that of another extinct human, the Denisovans -- said both species were severely inbred due to small populations. "Archaic populations had low genetic diversity,...

The frozen remains of a horse more than half a million years old have reluctantly given up their genetic secrets, providing scientists with the oldest DNA ever sequenced. The horse was discovered in 2003 in the ancient permafrost of Canada’s west-central Yukon Territory, not far from the Alaskan border.And although the animal was dated to between 560,000 and 780,000 years old, an international team of researchers was able to use a new combination of techniques to decipher its genetic code. Among the team’s findings is that the genus Equus — which includes all horses, donkeys, and zebras — dates back...

ISON is in an Outburst Now. The Hidden Code This is the quote from the 12 minute 35 second video that BPEarthWatch posted on YouTube.com:"God talks to our DNA." This quote comes from the 3 minute 14 second to the 3 minute 18 seconds part of that video.BPEarthWatch has a lot of information in this video and information that, I believe, should be discussed. He took 200 or 300 pages of information and tried to boil it down to this video and he's talking about ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) Waves and the Earth's Resonance Frequency of 7.8 Hz or...

Fudan University in Shanghai is to study China's historical figures such as Confucius and the early emperors through modern DNA technology, Beijing Times reports. The studies follow the latest findings published on Monday on Cao Cao, a warlord who lived nearly 2,000 years ago in final years of the Eastern Han Dynasty. It debunked rumors that Cao's father Cao Song was fostered by comparing the DNA of Cao's living descendents and that found in the teeth of Cao's grandfather. Han Sheng from Fudan University, who led the Cao Cao research, says it is a breakthrough in the fields of both...

“HAARP is a weapon of mass destruction, capable of destabilising agricultural and ecological systems globally.” “‘Climatic warfare’ potentially threatens the future of humanity, but has casually been excluded from the reports for which the IPCC received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.” Article on Weather Warfare by Michel Chossudovsky, The Ecologist, December 2007 Rarely acknowledged in the debate on global climate change, the world’s weather can now be modified as part of a new generation of sophisticated electromagnetic weapons. Both the US and Russia have developed capabilities to manipulate the climate for military use. Environmental modification techniques have been applied...

SANTA FE—Where did the first Americans come from? Most researchers agree that Paleoamericans moved across the Bering Land Bridge from Asia sometime before 15,000 years ago, suggesting roots in East Asia. But just where the source populations arose has long been a mystery. Now comes a surprising twist, from the complete nuclear genome of a Siberian boy who died 24,000 years ago—the oldest complete genome of a modern human sequenced to date. His DNA shows close ties to those of today's Native Americans. Yet he apparently descended not from East Asians, but from people who had lived in Europe or...

Neanderthal peoples' Asian cousins occupied the islands of our nearest neighbours and possibly Australia itself, scientists believe. Writing today in the journal Science, Adelaide University archaeologist Alan Cooper argues that the Denisovans – Neanderthal-like relatives of ancient humans – crossed Wallace’s Line, one of the world’s most formidable marine barriers, more than 100,000 years ago. Having achieved this feat, it would be “amazing” if they had not made what was then an easy crossing to Australia. “If you cross Wallace’s Line you’ve done all the hard work,” Professor Cooper told The Australian. The Denisovans were unknown before a finger bone...

No next-of-kin was around to claim the frozen 5,300-year-old body of Ötzi the Iceman when it was found in the Italian Alps in 1991, but researchers now report that there are at least 19 genetic relatives of Ötzi living in Austria's Tyrol region. "These men and the 'Iceman' had the same ancestors," Walther Parson, a researcher at the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck, told the Austrian Press Agency last week. The relatives may not know they're related, however. The Austrian researchers haven't told them. They found the 19 genetic matches by looking through the DNA records of 3,700 Austrian...

"None of the dynamic changes we observed could have been inferred from modern-day genetic data alone, highlighting the potential power of combining ancient DNA studies with archaeology to reconstruct human evolutionary history."

Something To Think About As We Head Into a Possible Government Shutdown…Remember this magical moment in American history? Well guess what? That whole thing started during a government shutdown.Monica was working long hours in the White House during the government shutdown of 1995.According to the Washington Post, “the second day of the government shutdown — marked the beginning of her sexual relationship with the President.”The Washington Post goes on to enlighten the reader in sordid detail the manner in which Bill J Clinton (You can just call him BJ) brought shame and degradation to the Office of the Presidency of...

A transgender man is the first in Europe to give birth to a baby after becoming pregnant through a sperm donor. The unidentified man, who was born a woman, delivered the baby boy at home with a midwife in the poor Neukoellin district of Berlin. He insisted on a home birth because he refused to be listed as the mother on any hospital documents - a legal requirement of in Germany. The case in Germany mirrors that of Thomas Beatie in the US, pictured, who has given birth to three children and was the first man to ever give birth...

WASHINGTON — It has been a decade since the human genome was first sequenced and the 3.2 billion rungs of our DNA ladder laid out for analysis. That achievement — mapping the fundamental biological code that defines our species and characterizes us as individuals — may have implications as important as the splitting of the atom or the discovery of the wheel. We can already envision custom-designed medicines as well as custom-designed fetuses. There are ethical questions to be asked and scientific questions to be answered. And nothing about the subject is simple. But credit “Genome: Unlocking Life’s Code,” an...

The scientists examined the DNA of mitochondria, tiny power plants within cells that get passed down from mother to child. Scientists use mitochondrial DNA from living populations to decipher ancient movements of their ancestors. Most studies have examined only a small part of the mitochondria's circular piece of DNA. But Antonio Torroni, a geneticist at the University of Pavia in Italy, and his coauthors compiled complete mitochondrial genomes from 41 native North Americans and combined that data with information from previous studies... supports the widely accepted notion of an initial coastal migration wave. A second wave of migration probably left...

The same protein tells beta cells in the pancreas to stop making insulin and then to self-destruct as diabetes worsens, according to a University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) study published online today in the journal Nature Medicine. Specifically, the research revealed that a protein called TXNIP controls the ability of beta cells to make insulin, the hormone that regulates blood-sugar levels. "We spent years confirming that TXNIP drives beta-cell death in both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes," said Anath Shalev, M.D., director of the UAB Comprehensive Diabetes Center and senior author of the paper. "We were astounded to...

The day after Stephanie Blessing learned she had been conceived with the assistance of a sperm donor and that the man she knew and loved as her father for 32 years was not her father, she went into shock. She remembers sitting in her rocking chair, staring into space. It was so bad, her husband had to remind her to do something as basic as changing their baby’s diaper. “I was just catatonic,” she said. The shock turned into depression, as she began to mourn what she had lost. “I was a daddy’s girl. I had a great childhood, and...

Researchers from the Gene and Stem Cell Therapy Program at Sydney's Centenary Institute have confirmed that, far from being "junk," the 97 per cent of human DNA that does not encode instructions for making proteins can play a significant role in controlling cell development. And in doing so, the researchers have unravelled a previously unknown mechanism for regulating the activity of genes, increasing our understanding of the way cells develop and opening the way to new possibilities

The personal life of Tennessee House Democrat Steve Cohen has been a bizarre mix of Days of Our Lives and Catfish lately: When he was caught tweeting during the State of the Union address to young aspiring swimsuit model Victoria Brink, he was forced to admit that she was his long-lost daughter. He deduced as much when, as he explained, he "Googled her mother, found out she had a child, and the math looked pretty accurate," despite another man believing all along that he was Brink's father. This morning, nearly six months after Cohen went public with his unscientific revelation,...

Blood of the Irish The Blood in Irish veins is Celtic, right? Well, not exactly. Although the history many Irish people were taught at school is the history of the Irish as a Celtic race, the truth is much more complicated, and much more interesting than that ...Research done into the DNA of Irish males has shown that the old Anthropological attempts to define 'Irish' have been misguided. As late as the 1950s researchers were busy collecting data among Irish people such as hair colour and height, in order to categorise them as a 'race' and define them as...

LONDON — You can ditch your computer and leave your cellphone at home, but you can't escape your DNA. It belongs uniquely to you — and, increasingly, to the authorities. Countries around the world are collecting genetic material from millions of citizens in the name of fighting crime and terrorism — and, according to critics, heading into uncharted ethical terrain. Leaders include the United States — where the Supreme Court recently backed the collection of DNA swabs from suspects on arrest — and Britain, where police held samples of almost 7 million people, more than 10 percent of the population,...

Pre-Columbian origins of Native American dog breeds, with only limited replacement by European dogs, confirmed by mtDNA analysis Barbara van Asch et al. Dogs were present in pre-Columbian America, presumably brought by early human migrants from Asia. Studies of free-ranging village/street dogs have indicated almost total replacement of these original dogs by European dogs, but the extent to which Arctic, North and South American breeds are descendants of the original population remains to be assessed. Using a comprehensive phylogeographic analysis, we traced the origin of the mitochondrial DNA lineages for Inuit, Eskimo and Greenland dogs, Alaskan Malamute, Chihuahua, xoloitzcuintli and...

Samples from a horse leg bone more than 700,000 years old have yielded the oldest full genome known to date... The Pleistocene horse genome Orlando and colleagues pieced together helped them determine that the ancestor to the Equus lineage -- the group that gave rise to modern horses, zebras, and donkeys -- arose 4 to 4.5 million years ago, or about two million years earlier than previously thought... The team found that Przewalski's horses were an offshoot of the lineage that gave rise to domestic horses. The two groups diverged around 50,000 years ago... The six-inch (15-centimeter) horse leg bone...

The first baby with three parents could be born as early as 2015 after a landmark decision to move ahead on a controversial genetic treatment. Britain could become the first country to sanction the creation of babies with three genetic parents, despite fears it might lead to ‘designer babies’. The Government will publish draft regulations later this year that will bring techniques a step closer to giving women affected by devastating hereditary diseases the chance to have healthy children. The techniques involve replacing defective DNA in the mother’s egg with material from a donor egg. The resulting healthy child would...

After chewing a piece of gum, you casually toss it in the garbage and think nothing of it. But what if a few days later, a stranger picks up that piece of gum and sequences your DNA using the trace amount of genetic material from the saliva that you’ve left behind? And what if the stranger then takes the information in your genetic code and reconstructs your likeness? Starting to get uncomfortable? Taking this scenario further, what if you have a genetic predisposition toward a disease or a disorder that you’re unaware of, and suddenly your DNA is in the...

Well-preserved specimen pushes back the timing of modern horse evolution. A group of Przewalski's horses, once considered extinct in the wild. Photograph by Michael Nichols, National Geographic Photograph courtesy D.G. Froese via Nature DNA shines a light back into the past, showing us things that fossils can't. But how far back can that light extend? Some of the oldest DNA sequences come from mastodon and polar bear fossils about 50,000 and 110,000 years old, respectively. But a new study published online today in the journal Nature reports the latest in the push for recovering ever more ancient DNA sequences. Samples...

This bit of science arcanum is especially cringe-worthy. Many years ago, scientists first discovered that a large minority of women have Y-chromosome gene sequences in their blood. At first glance, this seems strange. Men are born with Y-chromosomes but most women are not. The male cells in these women must’ve come from somewhere else. But where? The most obvious source is a fetus. Nearly every woman who has ever been pregnant or had a baby has cells from her fetus circulating in her bloodstream. These cells filter through the placenta and reside in the mother’s bloodstream and/or organs — including...

-- The roadblocks went up on a Friday at several points in two Alabama towns, about 40 miles on either side of Birmingham. For the next two days, off-duty sheriff's deputies in St. Clair County, to the east, and Bibb County, to the southwest, flagged down motorists and steered them toward federal highway safety researchers. The researchers asked them a few questions about drinking and drug use and asked them for breath, saliva and blood samples -- offering them $10 for saliva and $50 to give blood. It's not just in Alabama. The roadblocks are part of a national study...

It’s Father’s Day — but do these New York men have reason to celebrate? The Post spent the past few weeks cruising shotgun in a mobile DNA-testing truck helping doubtful dads find proof of their progeny. Health Street, the testing company, has two 27-foot Winnebagos — “Who’s Your Daddy?” emblazoned on either side — that rumble through the city seven days a week offering a range of services, including drug and heritage testing.

The woman was related to at least two of the three children. Was she their doting mother? An adoring aunt? Or, given her relative youth, perhaps a much older sister? "That leaves you with so many possibilities," says New Hampshire State Police Sgt. Joe Ebert. All four females are long dead, their bodies crammed into two 55-gallon barrels, the first barrel discovered by a hunter in 1985, the other 15 years later. They have never been identified. Now, there's a new push to solve a cold case that has stymied determined investigators.

PELL CITY, Alabama -- St. Clair and Bibb county authorities are confirming there were roadblocks at several locations in their counties Friday and Saturday asking for blood and DNA samples. However, the samples were voluntary and motorists were paid for them as part of a study, they said. According to Lt. Freddie Turrentine of the St. Clair County Sheriff's Department, it isn't the first time such roadblocks have occurred in the area. "They were here in 2007," said Turrentine, the supervisor in charge of the roadblocks, which took place in several locations in St. Clair County Friday night, early Saturday...

On Thursday’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” conservative talk show host Mark Levin reacted to recent revelations that the National Security Agency had been collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers. He said that the NSA news in addition to other openings for intrusion by the federal government are the makings of a “police state.” “I tell you what I make of this — we have the elements of a police state here, and I’m not overstating it,” Levin said. “When you step back and realize the Supreme Court the other day ruled...

Dr. John Sanford is a plant geneticist and inventor who conducted research at Cornell University for more than 25 years. He is best known for significant contributions to the field of transgenic crops, including the invention of the biolistic process (“gene gun”). Like many in his profession, he was fully invested in what he terms the “Primary Axiom” of modern science, namely that “man is merely the product of random mutations plus natural selection” (Sanford, 2008, p. v, italics in orig.). He argues that this cornerstone of modern Darwinism is almost universally accepted and rarely, if ever, questioned. In Genetic...

Our morning drive show reported this morning that the Federal DOT was taking DNA swabs and blood at apparent roadblocks in St Clair Co. Alabama. Pell City Police chief confirmed that off duty County deputies were used by Fed Dot to man the road blocks. DNA samples were apparently “voluntary”, as one witness said she was offered 60 bucks for blood and saliva while another declined blood but was paid 10 bucks for saliva. Nothing to see here folks, move along. After all it was “voluntary"

No flight of fancy: German siblings prove Lindbergh was their father By Andrew Gumbel 29 November 2003 Fans of the pioneering American aviator Charles Lindbergh have had to swallow a few uncomfortable facts about their hero over the years, such as his sympathy for the Nazis, his campaigning against the involvement of the United States in the Second World War and his anti-Semitism. Now comes a new, seemingly incontrovertible bit of awkward news: DNA evidence confirming that Mr Lindbergh, who made the first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, had a secret, second family in Germany with a Munich hatmaker,...

UPDATE: Why Govt. Source leaked PRISMAdditional information is being reported that confirms what most of us have always suspected. NSA is collecting all our email data, tracking our movements, our photographs, our documents, etc. Also factor in the fact that a court recently ruled that Obama is free to collect our DNA without being found guilty of any crime. National Security Agency (NSA) building designed for massive data collection in Utah:WaPo reports the following:The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection...

Genetic Recombination Study Defies Human-Chimp Evolution by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. * Results from a recent study in human and chimpanzee genetics have shipwrecked yet another Darwinian hypothesis.1 Genetic recombination is one of the key events that occur during the production of egg and sperm cells, and secular scientists have long thought it to be a major driver of human and ape evolution. When sperm and egg cells are formed in humans and various animals, the process of meiosis generates genetic variation. For example, since humans have two sets of chromosomes, when similar ones (i.e., sister chromatids)–one each from your mother...

WASHINGTON (AP) - A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday said police can routinely take DNA from people they arrest, equating a DNA cheek swab to other common jailhouse procedures like fingerprinting.

Eight major studies of identical twins in Australia, the U.S., and Scandinavia during the last two decades all arrive at the same conclusion: gays were not born that way. “At best genetics is a minor factor,” says Dr. Neil Whitehead, PhD. Whitehead worked for the New Zealand government as a scientific researcher for 24 years, then spent four years working for the United Nations and International Atomic Energy Agency. Most recently, he serves as a consultant to Japanese universities about the effects of radiation exposure. His PhD is in biochemistry and statistics. Identical twins have the same genes or DNA....

They spent nearly 500 years in a watery grave with no record of who they were, but now the crew of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s ill fated flagship, could finally be identified. Scientists have begun work to extract DNA from the bones that were found on board the Tudor warship when it was raised from the bottom of The Solent 30 years ago. They hope to use the genetic information to identify the men who perished on the vessel when it sank and perhaps even trace their living relatives. It comes as a new £23 million museum built around...

The country’s top Islamic guidance body, Council of Islamic Ideology (CII), on Wednesday declared the Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) test unacceptable as evidence in case of forced rape, besides terming cloning as unethical and un-Islamic. The members of the Council of Islamic Ideology met under the chairmanship of Maulana Mohammad Khan Sherani during a two-day sitting of the council. CII members declared the cloning process ‘Haram’ or ‘forbidden’ under Islam, saying it would not be permitted. However, the cloning procedure could be used for the replacement of damaged body parts, or the growth of new parts of the human body for...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Protesters rallied in dozens of cities Saturday as part of a global protest against seed giant Monsanto and the genetically modified food it produces, organizers said. Organizers said "March Against Monsanto" protests were held in 52 countries and 436 cities, including Los Angeles where demonstrators waved signs that read "Real Food 4 Real People" and "Label GMOs, It's Our Right to Know."… The U.S. Senate this week overwhelmingly rejected a bill that would allow states to require labeling of genetically modified foods.

EAU CLAIRE, Wis. (WEAU) -- It is a change that could affect all of us literally down to the core. This week the legislature will take up a plan by the governor that would require anyone arrested for a felony or convicted of a misdemeanor to give a DNA sample. "Present time anyone who is convicted of a felony is required to provide a DNA sample," said Harry Hertel. Hertel, an attorney with Hertel Law SC, sees a problem with the proposal. Mainly he says it requires good people who may have made a mistake to give up something very...

When the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans discovered the 4,000-year-old Palace of Minos on Crete in 1900, he saw the vestiges of a long-lost civilization whose artefacts set it apart from later Bronze-Age Greeks. The Minoans, as Evans named them, were refugees from Northern Egypt who had been expelled by invaders from the South about 5,000 years ago, he claimed. Modern archaeologists have questioned that version of events, and now ancient DNA recovered from Cretan caves suggests that the Minoan civilization emerged from the early farmers who settled the island thousands of years earlier....

... So-called junk DNA, the vast majority of the genome that doesn't code for proteins, really isn't needed for a healthy organism, according to new research. "At least for a plant, junk DNA really is just junk — it's not required," said study co-author Victor Albert, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the University of Buffalo in New York. ... Albert and his colleagues sequenced the genome of the carnivorous bladderwort plant, Utricularia gibba, which lives in wet soil or fresh water throughout the world and sucks swimming microorganisms into its tiny, 1-milimeter-long bladders. The genome had just 80 million base...

The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History recently acquired the remains, clothing and coffin of William Taylor White, a 15-year-old boy who was buried in Washington, D.C. in 1852. His coffin was unearthed in Washington's Columbia Heights neighborhood in April 2005 during a construction project at an apartment building. White, who was a student at Columbian College from Accomack County, Va., died of pneumonia and complications from a mitral heart defect. When his coffin was unearthed, his identity was a deep mystery. Only through the diligent work of a multi-disciplinary team of Smithsonian staff, student interns and external specialists was...

Female DNA Found on Bomb in Boston Attack By EVAN PEREZ And DEVLIN BARRETT Investigators have found female DNA on at least one of the bombs used in the Boston Marathon attacks, though they haven't determined whose DNA it is or whether that means a woman helped the two suspects carry out the attacks, according to U.S. officials briefed on the probe. The officials familiar with the case cautioned that there could be multiple explanations for why the DNA of someone other than the two bombing suspects—Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother, Dzhokhar—could have been found on remnants of the...

Dr Steven Greer, who led the project and documentary, has hit back at critics who claim the body is a hoax. 'The CAT scan clearly shows internal chest organs -lungs and what appears to be the remains of a heart structure,' he said. 'There is absolutely no doubt that the specimen is an actual organism and that it is not a hoax of any kind. 'This fact has been confirmed by Dr. Nolan and Dr. Lachman at Stanford.'

The genetic makeup of Europe mysteriously transformed about 4,000-5,000 years ago, researchers have discovered. An Australian team found the unexplained change while analysing several skeletons unearthed in central Europe that were up to 7,500 years old. They say the rapid expansion of the Bell Beaker culture, which is believed to have been instrumental in building the monoliths at Stonehedge, could hold the key.