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Bringing extinct animals back to life is really happening — and it’s going to be very, very cool. Unless it ends up being very, very bad. The first time Ben Novak saw a passenger pigeon, he fell to his knees and remained in that position, speechless, for 20 minutes. He was 16. At 13, Novak vowed to devote his life to resurrecting extinct animals. At 14, he saw a photograph of a passenger pigeon in an Audubon Society book and “fell in love.” But he didn’t know that the Science Museum of Minnesota, which he was then visiting with a...

Miraculous claims surrounding the coming forth of the Book of Mormon are an evidence of the prophetic calling of Joseph Smith. Critics intent on discrediting the Restoration point to DNA studies on indigenous American peoples in an attempt to expose Joseph, the Book of Mormon, and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as frauds. Claiming that scientific evidence excludes any possibility that Middle Eastern or ancient Jewish travelers came to the Americas in antiquity, such critics attempt to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of Latter-day Saints and those of other faiths concerning the authenticity of the...

WILMINGTON, N.C. — A Wilmington apartment complex will soon be running DNA tests on dog poop to identify owners who don't clean up after their pooches do their business. The StarNews of Wilmington reports The Reserve at Forest Hills will ask the complex's 100 dog owners to have their pets swabbed for a DNA sample. Then, if poop found in the complex matches a pet, the owner will be fined and also will have to pay for the DNA testing which can cost up to $50.

Researchers say they’ve found more DNA evidence that possibly shows gay men don’t have a choice — that their biological makeup drives them to homosexuality. In a study at Chicago University, researchers looked at DNA chains of 400-plus pairs of gay brothers and found what they said were two distinct bits of genetic material that they claim are linked to homosexuality, The Daily Mail reported. The gay brothers were identified and recruited to help with the study over the course of several years’ worth of Gay Pride festivals and marches. The research was highlighted during the recent annual American Association...

What a treat for all medieval historians! More than 500 years after he was killed, the skeleton of Richard III is giving them much more reliable biographical information than they acquired over the previous half a millennium. Henry VII, his successor, and opponent at Bosworth, encouraged his court historians to produce a warped picture of Richard. Thank God, then, for the miraculous discovery of his body in a Leicester car park in 2012, and the undeniable truths it provided. Analysis of his skeleton showed the king didn’t have a hunchback exactly; he suffered from scoliosis of the spine, meaning his...

The Black Death of the 14th century may be written into the DNA of survivors' descendants, new research finds. The study reveals that Roma people (sometimes known as gypsies, although this is considered a derogatory term) and white Europeans share alterations to their genetic code that occurred after the Roma settled in Europe from northwest India 1,000 years ago. The plague of the 1300s, which killed at least 75 million people, is a likely candidate for forcing this evolutionary change. "We show that there are some immune receptors that are clearly influenced by evolution in Europe and not in northwest...

hat caused the fall of the Roman Empire? A devastating plague that struck during the reign of Emperor Justinian in 541 AD, killing a quarter of the population, seems to have landed the final blow, but the identity of the infection was a mystery. Now sequencing of DNA taken from two skeletons buried in Bavaria, Germany, in the 6th century has uncovered the complete genome of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria also blamed for the Black Death that struck Europe in 1348. The find suggests that Y. pestis may have emerged to ravage humanity several times. Hendrik Poinar at McMaster University...

Here's What Happened When Neanderthals And Ancient Humans Hooked Up 80,000 Years Ago Dina Spector Jan. 29, 2014, 1:49 PM     Neanderthal REUTERS/Nikola Solic Hyperrealistic face of a neanderthal male is displayed in a cave in the new Neanderthal Museum in the northern Croatian town of Krapina February 25, 2010 By comparing the Neanderthal genome to modern human DNA, the authors of two new studies, both published on Wednesday, show how DNA that humans have inherited from breeding with Neanderthals has shaped us. Modern humans, Neanderthals, and their sister lineage, Denisovans, descended from a common ancestor. The...

The headlines about this individual having dark skin are well founded, like the Luxembourg hunter-gatherer the sample has ancestral “non-European” copies of most of the major loci which are known to have large effect sizes (SLC24A5, which is now fixed in Europeans, SLC45A2, which is present at frequencies north of 80% in most of Europe, and KITLG, a lower frequency variant known to have a major impact on skin and hair). Additionally, this individual is related to the Ma’lta individual, just like the Swedish hunter-gatherers, but unlike the Luxembourg male (which did predate the Spanish samples by 1,000 years). Lots...

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 different to the British....

Police presence is often all it takes to make voluntary experiences seem mandatory. Ricardo Nieves, one of those flagged down by Reading police officers, felt the experience was anything but voluntary, and that attempting to leave would have been greeted by a possible arrest.  The Reading city council and the mayor himself also expressed concern about the use of police officers to acquire "voluntary" blood and saliva samples. For his part, Chief Heim appears to be ready to just ride out this outrage without offering any concession towards the offended public.  But if that's what Heim had planned, Nieves just threw...

In 2012, a variety of research papers associated with the ENCODE project (Encyclopedia Of DNA Elements) described how the human genome was pervasively copied—transcribed—into an amazing array of functional RNA molecules that regulate how genes and the genome function.1 Much of the pervasive transcription is based on long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) that have the same control features as protein-coding genes but with other functions.2 A large group of lncRNAs stay in the cell’s nucleus, where some directly regulate how genes are expressed while others help modify chromosome structure. Some lncRNAs are exported into the cell’s cytoplasm to regulate the production...

After Osama Bin Ladin was killed, someone on our side released the name of the doctor who, with DNA tests verified that OBL was in the compound. Who did it and why?

It is one of the most unusual evolutionary ideas ever proposed: humans are amphibious apes who lost their fur, started to walk upright and developed big brains because they took to living the good life by the water’s edge. This is the aquatic ape theory and although treated with derision by some academics over the past 50 years, it is still backed by a small, but committed group of scientists. From next Wednesday through Friday, they will hold a major London conference when several speakers, including British naturalist and broadcaster, David Attenborough, will voice support for the theory. “Humans are...

Drivers in a southeastern Pennsylvania town were forced off a local street and into a parking lot, so a federal contractor – aided by local police --could quiz them about their road habits and ask for a cheek swab, in a replay of an incident last month in Texas. The checkpoint, in downtown Reading, was one of several conducted by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, which was hired by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Although the questioning and cheek swab were voluntary, local residents said they were...

A private firm with a federal contract - and backed up by city police - forced motorists off Laurel Street and into a private parking lot Friday to question them about their driving habits and ask for a swab of their mouth. "I feel this incident is a gross abuse of power on many levels," Reading resident Ricardo Nieves, one of those stopped, told City Council Monday. He said federal and local tax dollars were being used to stop innocent people without probable cause, and allow a private company to hire uniformed police to force citizens to listen to their...

U.S. geneticists say a second code hiding within DNA changes how scientists read its instructions and interpret mutations to make sense of health and disease. Since the genetic code was deciphered in the 1960s, scientists have assumed it was used exclusively to write information about proteins, but University of Washington scientists say they've discovered genomes use the genetic code to write two separate "languages." One, long understood, describes how proteins are made, while the other instructs the cell on how genes are controlled. One language is written on top of the other, which is why the second language remained hidden...

Scientists have discovered a second code hiding within DNA. This second code contains information that changes how scientists read the instructions contained in DNA and interpret mutations to make sense of health and disease. UW scientists were stunned to discover that genomes use the genetic code to write two separate languages. One describes how proteins are made, and the other instructs the cell on how genes are controlled. One language is written on top of the other, which is why the second language remained hidden for so long. The genetic code uses a 64-letter alphabet called codons. The UW team...

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...

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...