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A Pennsylvania wedding DJ admitted Tuesday to raping and strangling to death an elementary school teacher whose 26-year cold case was solved with help from DNA submitted to a genealogy database by his half-sister. In court Tuesday, Raymond Rowe, 50, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the death of 25-year-old Christy Mirack, online court records show. Rowe went by the stage name DJ Freez and claimed on his now-defunct website he worked as a DJ for celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Brooke Hogan, as well as at events featuring Sting, The Eagles and Kenny Kravitz. He was sentenced to life in prison without...

... Christy Mirack was found on the floor of her living room on December 21, 1992, strangled, beaten with a wooden cutting board and raped. DNA was collected at the scene, but there were no matches -- until last year, when the sample was sent to Parabon NanoLabs, a DNA technology company, for genetic testing. Parabon NanoLabs generated a genotype file from the DNA sample, then a DNA phenotype "composite" of the killer's attributes -- including hair, eye color and skin tone, the district attorney said. That helped experts get an idea of what the killer looked like as he...

Gathering info here on DNA tests. Good ones/ those to avoid? Feedback? thanks. I've been doing genealogy for some time; cousin got the test and I am curious.

“I’m glad you asked that question. I genuinely am,” she told an attendee at a town hall who asked about the test's results. “I’m not a person of color. I’m not a citizen of a tribe. Tribal citizenship is very different from ancestry. Tribes and only tribes determine tribal citizenship and I respect that difference,” she continued.

After The New York Times reported that death row inmate Kevin Cooper may have been framed for the murder of a family of four in 1983, he got the Christmas present of new hope on Monday when California Gov. Jerry Brown ordered a new DNA test that could prove his innocence.

The newly-elected Robeson County Sheriff is revealing new details about a missed warning that could have kept an accused murderer behind bars. In an exclusive interview with the ABC11 I-Team, Sheriff Burnis Wilkins confirms at least two members of the sheriff's office knew about DNA evidence linking Michael McClellan to an old rape case more than a year before McClellan allegedly kidnapped and murdered Hania Aguilar. District Attorney Johnson Britt told ABC11 at the time that McLellan's DNA from that case was used in the investigation of Hania's case. Britt, however, would later reveal that the Robeson County Sheriff's Office...

Chewed tar is an unexpectedly great source of ancient DNA. No one today quite understands how they did it, but people in the Stone Age could turn ribbons of birch bark into sticky, black tar. They used this tar to make tools, fixing arrowheads onto arrows and blades onto axes. And they chewed it, as evidenced by teeth marks in some lumps. These unassuming lumps of chewed birch-bark tar turn out to be an extraordinary source of ancient DNA. This month, two separate research groups posted preprints describing DNA from the tar in Stone Age Scandinavia. The two papers have...

Take a second look at your iced or steaming tea. Guided by scientific experts, three New York City high school students using tabletop DNA technologies found several herbal brews and a few brands of tea contain ingredients unlisted on the manufacturers' package. The teen sleuths also demonstrated new-to-science genetic variation between broad-leaf teas from exported from India versus small-leaf teas exported from China. Guided by DNA "barcoding" experts at The Rockefeller University, an ethno-botanist at Tufts University and a molecular botany expert at The New York Botanical Garden, co-authors Catherine Gamble, 18, Rohan Kirpekar, 18, and Grace Young, 15, of...

Landmark new research that involves analyzing millions of DNA barcodes has debunked much about what we know today about the evolution of species.In a massive genetic study, senior research associate at the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University Mark Stoeckle and University of Basel geneticist David Thaler discovered that virtually 90 percent of all animals on Earth appeared at right around the same time.More specifically, they found out that 9 out of 10 animal species on the planet came to being at the same time as humans did some 100,000 to 200,000 years ago."This conclusion is very surprising,"...

When the fake Indian loses both The New York Times and The Boston Globe on the same day, you know she's lost America. [Snip] What an ignominious end for Harvard Law School's "first woman of color," and just because it turned out that Elizabeth Warren's color was white - alabaster in fact. She's whiter than Casper the Friendly Ghost dipped in a vat of Elmer's Glue. It was just a few weeks ago that the fake Indian sanctimoniously released the results of her alleged DNA test. She thought it was going to be the greatest triumph of Indian arms since...

WEST POINT, Va. (WRIC) -- Students and parents in West Point, a town roughly an hour east of Richmond, are rallying behind a teacher put on paid administrative leave following a transgender controversy at the school. A French teacher at West Point High School, Peter Vlaming, is currently on paid administrative leave for not using a student's preferred identity pronoun. 8News reached out to the school for comment but West Point Public Schools cited the incident as "a personnel issue" and declined to respond about the status of Vlaming's case. Students told 8News that Vlaming won't use male pronouns for...

Ticket prices to see former President Bill Clinton and Hillary speak have gone as low as $7 in some locations– and the seats are still empty. Former President Bill Clinton and failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton have been touring the U.S. and Canada for months, with dates stretching into mid-2019. Unfortunately for the Clintons, people seem to be quickly losing interest in entertaining their nostalgia and opinions on the current state of the nation.

The snow is falling lightly. My thoughts are racing darkly. I’m feeling something foreign, something I’ve never felt before. It takes me a moment to identify it. I’m feeling sorry for the Clintons. In the 27 years I’ve covered Bill and Hillary, I’ve experienced a range of emotions. They’ve dazzled me and they’ve disgusted me. But now they’re mystifying me. I’m looking around Scotiabank Arena, the home of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and it’s a depressing sight. It’s two-for-the-price-of-one in half the arena. The hockey rink is half curtained off, but even with that, organizers are scrambling at the last...

All humans are descended from just TWO people and a catastrophic event almost wiped out ALL species 100,000 years ago, scientists claim Genetic 'bar codes' of five million animals from different species were surveyedThe research deduced that humans and animals sprang from single pair This happened after a catastrophic event a long time after the last ice age All modern humans descended from a solitary pair who lived 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, scientists say.Scientists surveyed the genetic 'bar codes' of five million animals - including humans - from 100,000 different species and deduced that we sprang from a...

Twitter permanently suspended prominent feminist Meghan Murphy last week for saying men aren’t women. Murphy accused the social media platform of “censoring basic facts and silencing people.” Meghan Murphy, the founder of Feminist Current and a journalist who has written for New Statesman, Vice News, CBC News, and the Globe and Mail, was permanently suspended from Twitter last week after the social network implemented a ban on “misgendering” transgender people. The posts which reportedly led to Murphy’s ban were, “Women aren’t men,” and “How are transwomen not men? What is the difference between a man and a transwoman?” After Twitter made...

MtDNA exists separately from the rest of our DNA, inside the thousands of mitochondria within each cell, rather than the cell nucleus. It is so widely accepted as being from the mother's side it is sometimes known as the Eve Gene, the idea being that it can be traced back to some primeval mother of all living humans. Testing of mtDNA is used to identify maternal ancestry. However, all that will have to change after Dr Shiyu Luo of the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. After testing of...

A new documentary series offers an emotional look behind the mask of someone who has stood stoic in the public eye for decades. In the A&E series, "The Clinton Affair," Monica Lewinsky is more forthright than she's been in years about her relationship with former President Bill Clinton. In the A&E series, which premieres this Sunday, Lewinsky talks about the highs of her time at the White House. At one point she describes how she felt being called in by Clinton, "I don't think my heart had ever beat as fast." And the lowest of lows, when she was confronted...

By sequencing and analyzing 15 ancient genomes found throughout the Americas—six of which were older than 10,000 years—these researchers determined that, around 8,000 years ago, the ancestors of Native Americans were still on the move, migrating away from Mesoamerica (what is today Mexico and Central America) toward both North and South America. These groups moved rapidly and unevenly, sometimes interbreeding with local populations, complicating the genetic—and historical—picture even further. The close genetic similarity observed between some of the groups studied suggests rapid migratory speed through North and South America. The Meltzer and Willerslev team, which included dozens of researchers from...

This story came out earlier this week but it was shocking enough that it bears a look. The transgender activist community was all abuzz on Thursday over a letter that had actually been featured in the New York Times a week earlier. Buzzfeed picked it up and ran with it, adding to the celebratory mood. The document in question was an open letter published by a gaggle of 1,600 scientists who are rejecting the anticipated HHS memo defining sex and gender in traditional, scientifically accepted terms for purposes of Title IX questions. What’s truly amazing is the fact that these...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) released her DNA tests recently, and it showed what we’ve known for years: she’s not really Native American. The allegation has hung around her neck since 2012. Warren has claimed that she has Cherokee ancestry. She doesn’t. She is 1/1024th Native American. I have more Native American blood than Warren…and I have none. All credit for that line goes to Donald J. Trump.If this is the new benchmark established by liberals to shield their own from terrible acts of cultural appropriation for personal gain, then I guess we can be whomever the hell we want.So, what to...