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New research shows that all blue-eyed people share a common ancestor. This person lived more than 6,000 years ago and carried a genetic mutation that has now spread across the world. The exact cause remains to be determined but scientists do know that eye color began to change long before recorded history began. The following is a transcript of the video. All blue-eyed people have one ancestor in common, born around 6,000-10,000 years ago. Blue eyes are caused by a gene mutation. For years, researchers had searched for it on the OCA2 gene. The OCA2 gene determines how much brown...

WICHITA, Kan. — A judge’s decision to acquit an officer of murder in the death of a black suspect came down to two major questions: Did the officer plant a gun, and did his outburst about killing the man seconds before the shooting signal premeditation? St. Louis Circuit Judge Timothy Wilson determined Friday that prosecutors failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Jason Stockley’s use of deadly force was not justifiable self-defense. Anthony Lamar Smith was killed in the 2011 encounter. “Ultimately when people argue about this case, they are going to be arguing whether the judge drew the...

QUITO, Ecuador (AP) -- Scientists in Ecuador's Galapagos islands are hoping to restore a tortoise species believed extinct since the 1800s. The Chelonoidis elephantopus lived on Floreana Island and was captured by seamen in large numbers for food during long journeys across the Pacific. The species is thought to have disappeared shortly after Charles Darwin's celebrated visit to the treasured archipelago. But a group of international scientists who collected 1,700 blood samples from tortoises on Isabel Island farther north during a research expedition in 2012 made a surprising discovery: 80 had genetic traces of the lost species. "This is a...

A special thanks to Dr. Neil Lamb at the Hudson Alpha Institute for Biotechnology. A major mission of Hudson Alpha is to educate the public and promote genomics literacy. I talked to many scientists about Genotyping but Dr. Lamb's ability to break down the complexity of the human genome is what finally brought it home for me. ----- I was concerned about what actually happens with my genetic information when submitted to 23andMe, so when they approached me and asked me if I wanted to make a video I decided to investigate it top to bottom. Visiting the Lab and...

Parents of students at a New Jersey high school were ordered to get their children’s blood and urine tested after a can of beer was discovered at a football game. The can of beer reportedly landed on the ground and was spotted by a school official during a game at Randolph High School on Friday night.

The Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation says a paternity test has disproved a Spanish woman's claim that she is the surrealist artist's daughter. The foundation said on Wednesday that the Madrid court that ordered the DNA test informed it that Maria Pilar Abel, a 61-year-old tarot card reader, has no biological relationship with Dali. Abel has long alleged her mother had an affair with Dali while working as a domestic helper in Figueres and claimed she had the right to part of his vast estate. The foundation said the court supervising the tests had informed its lawyers that Abel was not Dali's...

...In late 1998, the prestigious scientific journal Nature announced that it had conducted DNA testings which proved that Thomas Jefferson had fathered a child with Sally Hemings. According to Nature:Almost two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson was alleged to have fathered children by his slave Sally Hemings. The charges have remained controversial. Now, DNA analysis confirms that Jefferson was indeed the father of at least one of Hemings’ children.1 (snip) These authors, however, deliberately ignored the non-paternity results of the DNA testing. In fact, the original Nature article had reported that Thomas Woodson–the child that oral traditions claim was born...

The absence of a father — due to incarceration, death, separation or divorce — has adverse physical and behavioral consequences for a growing child. But little is known about the biological processes that underlie this link between father loss and child well-being. In a study (link is external) published July 18 in the journal Pediatrics, a team of FFCWS researchers report that the loss of a father has a significant adverse effect on telomeres, the protective nucleoprotein end caps of chromosomes. At 9 years of age, children who had lost their father had significantly shorter telomeres — 14 percent...

A new tip in the 2005 disappearance of Natalee Holloway has led to the discovery of human remains in Aruba   Those remains are now undergoing DNA testing with results expected in the next month Natalee's father Dave revealed on Wednesday The tip in the case came from a man named Gabriel, who lived with Joran van der Sloot's best friend John Gabriel claims van der Sloot told John that he gave a drink spiked with the date rape drug GHB to Natalee, 18, who choked on her own vomit Van der Sloot allegedly called his father Paulus at that point, who...

The rapid improvement in DNA sequencing has sparked a big data revolution in genomic sciences, which has in turn led to a proliferation of bioinformatics tools. To date, these tools have encountered little adversarial pressure. This paper evaluates the robustness of such tools if (or when) adversarial attacks manifest. We demonstrate, for the first time, the synthesis of DNA which — when sequenced and processed— gives an attacker arbitrary remote code execution. To study the feasibility of creating and synthesizing a DNA-based exploit, we performed our attack on a modified downstream sequencing utility with a deliberately introduced vulnerability. After sequencing,...

The multidisciplinary team at the University of Washington isn’t out to make outlandish headlines, although it’s certainly done that. They were concerned that the security infrastructure around DNA transcription and analysis was inadequate, having found elementary vulnerabilities in open-source software used in labs around the world. Given the nature of the data usually being handled, this could be a serious problem going forward. Sure, they could demonstrate the weakness of the systems with the usual malware and remote access tools. That’s how any competent attacker would come at such a system. But the discriminating security professional prefers to stay ahead...

Researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Ohio State's College of Engineering have developed a new technology, Tissue Nanotransfection (TNT), that can generate any cell type of interest for treatment within the patient's own body. This technology may be used to repair injured tissue or restore function of aging tissue, including organs, blood vessels and nerve cells. Results of the regenerative medicine study published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. "By using our novel nanochip technology, injured or compromised organs can be replaced. We have shown that skin is a fertile land where we can grow the elements...

Last week, the American Journal of Human Genetics published a study connecting the DNA of ancient Canaanites to modern-day people in Lebanon. Various news outlets immediately reported that this study proved the Bible wrong, when nothing could be further from the truth. Evolution News' David Klinghoffer compiled a helpful series of headlines: “Study disproves the Bible’s suggestion that the ancient Canaanites were wiped out” (The Telegraph) “Bible says Canaanites were wiped out by Israelites but scientists just found their descendants living in Lebanon” (The Independent) “Bronze Age DNA disproves the Bible’s claim that the Canaanites were wiped out: Study says...

DNA research is shining new light on the Biblical Canaanite civilization, which existed thousands of years ago in the Middle East. The ancient civilization, which created the first alphabet and is mentioned frequently in the Bible, has long fascinated historians. LiveScience reports that, because the Canaanites kept their records on papyrus, rather than clay, relatively little is known about them. Now, however, scientists have found a genetic ‘trail’ back to the Canaanites’ ancient world. By sequencing the genomes of five Canaanites that lived 4,000 years ago with genomes from 99 people living in modern day Lebanon, researchers identified a strong...

There was a spate of headlines last week claiming that new scientific discoveries disproved the historical narrative of the Bible. Headlines included, "DNA vs the Bible: Israelites did not wipe out the Canaanites" and "Study disproves the Bible's suggestion that the ancient Canaanites were wiped out." The problem is that the reverse is actually true: The discoveries confirm what the Scriptures explicitly state.Not surprisingly, these headlines didn't come from obscure, Bible-bashing websites. Instead, they came from Cosmos Magazine, Yahoo.com, New Scientist (claiming that the discovery helped unravel the "true fate" of the Canaanites), and others. As stated in the New York...

The first known attempt at creating genetically modified human embryos in the United States has been carried out by a team of researchers in Portland, Oregon, MIT Technology Review has learned.

The new samples come from Sidon, a coastal city in Lebanon. Marc Haber, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, U.K., extracted enough DNA from the ancient skeletons to sequence the whole genomes of five Canaanite individuals, all around 3700 years old. Haber’s first mission was to figure out who the Canaanites were, genetically speaking. Ancient Greek sources suggested they had migrated to the Levant from the East. To test that, Haber and colleagues compared the Canaanite genomes to those of other ancient populations in Eurasia. It turned out the Greeks were half right: About 50% of...

A Houston man is on the hook for $65,000 in child support for a child that's not his. Gabriel Cornejo, 45, took a DNA test proving a child his ex-girlfriend had 16 years ago was not his. The test was too late. In 2003, a child support court in Houston ruled that Cornejo owed his ex-girlfriend child support because, she claims, there was no way he wasn't the father.

Salvador Dali’s body was exhumed for a paternity test and the legendary artist’s famous mustache is still intact 28 years after his death. A woman is claiming that her mother had an affair with Dali and requested a paternity test. If she’s Dali’s daughter, she’ll have a right to the Dali estate. A judge sanctioned the exhumation. Narcis Bardalet was in charge of embalming Dali’s body after the artist passed away in 1989. “When I took off the silk handkerchief, I was very emotional,” Bardalet said, via BBC. “I was eager to see him and I was absolutely stunned. It...

An image and short film has been encoded in DNA, using the units of inheritance as a medium for storing information. Using a genome editing tool known as Crispr, US scientists inserted a gif - five frames of a horse galloping - into the DNA of bacteria. Then the team sequenced the bacterial DNA to retrieve the gif and the image, verifying that the microbes had indeed incorporated the data as intended. In order to insert this information into the genomes of bacteria, the researchers transferred the image and the movie onto nucleotides (building blocks of DNA), producing a code...