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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...

Junk science endangers lives. Forensic junk science in the hands of overzealous prosecutors, ignorant police detectives and reckless experts threatens liberty. There is a crisis in America's government-run crime labs -- and it's not just the result of a few rogue operators. The problem is long-festering and systemic. In April, Massachusetts state crime lab chemist Annie Dookhan made national headlines after investigations and lawsuits over her misconduct prompted the state's Supreme Judicial Court to order the largest dismissal of criminal convictions in U.S. history. Prosecutors were forced to dismiss a stunning 21,000-plus drug cases after Dookhan admitted to forging signatures,...

The biblical narrative that the first Egyptian Dynasty descended from the biblical Ham, the son of Noah, as told in the book of Genesis, could well be supported by recent research based on DNA taken from Egyptian mummies, analysts said. (Photo: REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El Ghany)Egyptian Minister of Antiquities Khaled Al-Anani inside a newly discovered burial site in Minya, Egypt May 13, 2017.According to CNN, researchers from the University of Tuebingen and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, both in Germany, found "unexpected results" when decoding the genome of ancient Egyptians.Their work, published online in Nature Communications,...

In a scientific first, DNA taken from Egyptian mummies has been decoded, producing unexpected results about the true origins of the Egyptian people. These results confirm a controversial theory that traces the First Egyptian Dynasty back to Biblical Ham, as described in the Book of Genesis. Scientists have long been baffled by the origins of the Egyptian people. Until now, there was no empirical data to clarify the issue. The study of Egypt’s population history could only draw on literary and indirect archaeological references, and inferences made from genetic studies of present-day Egyptians. Based on these sources, most researchers believed...

For generations, cross-referencing tombstones at the cemetery and vital records was required to unlock your lineage. But now, you can easily uncover some of the mystery of your family tree with DNA. Consumers like Larry Guernsey are giving the service as gifts. "I thought it would be a good Christmas present," Guernsey said. The $99 DNA test uses a saliva sample to trace family history. Here's how one company that provides the service, Ancestry, says it works: "A simple test can reveal an estimate of your ethnic mix… like if you're Irish or Scandinavian, or both." For Guernsey his curiosity...

The Bible describes humans as being created in the image of God—the pinnacle of His creation. In contrast, those who embrace the presupposition of naturalistic origins have put much effort and even monkey business into a propaganda crusade to claim a bestial origin for man. The idea that humans evolved from an ape-like creature was first widely promoted by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the early 1800s and later by Charles Darwin in his 1871 book The Descent of Man—published 12 years after his acclaimed evolutionary treatise On the Origin of Species. Thomas Huxley, a friend of Darwin, also did much to...

SANTA ANA A carjacker from Orange has been sentenced to three years in prison after authorities identified him through DNA he left on a cigarette in the recovered car. Gary Munoz, 30, was arrested, charged and convicted in less than two months, thanks to the county’s RAPID DNA program, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office said in a Tuesday statement. On March 9 at about 3:30 p.m., Munoz approached an idling car in a parking lot off of Imperial Highway in Brea, prosecutors said. A woman was in the passenger seat while the driver was out looking for an ATM...

The question can’t get more personal. Can you give up the rights to your DNA data? The answer is yes. And Larry Guernsey of San Jose knows firsthand. Family intrigue led Guernsey to buy his wife a DNA test kit from Ancestry DNA. “She’s always been interested in genealogy,” he said, noting that his wife had always wondered if she was part Indian. The $99 Ancestry DNA test Guernsey bought as a Christmas present uses a saliva sample to trace family history. “A simple test can reveal an estimate of your ethnic mix,” says the announcer in an Ancestry DNA...

Bennett Greenspan - Are Modern Jews Descended from the Biblical Israelites?

While environmental and inherited factors have well-known roles in cancer development, a new study provides evidence that a third, and until this point scientifically undervalued factor, is at the root of nearly two-thirds of cancer-causing mutations: random and unpredictable errors that occur in normal DNA replication. Cells are constantly regenerating, and every time a healthy cell divides, there are about three random mistakes or mutations in the copied DNA. Most of the time these copying errors are harmless. However, occasionally they occur in a cancer driver gene, which is just “bad luck,” study author Bert Vogelstein, M.D., co-director of the...

Scientists have made a discovery that could lead to a revolutionary drug that actually reverses ageing. The drug could help damaged DNA to miraculously repair and even protect Nasa astronauts on Mars by protecting them from solar radiation. A team of researchers developed the drug after discovering a key signalling process in DNA repair and cell ageing. During trials on mice, the team found that the drug directly repaired DNA damage caused by radiation exposure or old age. 'The cells of the old mice were indistinguishable from the young mice after just one week of treatment,' said lead author Professor...

House GOP would let employers demand workers' genetic test results https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/10/workplace-wellness-genetic-testing/ House Republicans would let employers demand workers’ genetic test results By Sharon Begley @sxbegle March 10, 2017 A little-noticed bill moving through Congress would allow companies to require employees to undergo genetic testing or risk paying a penalty of thousands of dollars, and would let employers see that genetic and other health information. Giving employers such power is now prohibited by legislation including the 2008 genetic privacy and nondiscrimination law known as GINA. The new bill gets around that landmark law by stating explicitly that GINA and other protections do...

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had researchers at Trent University’s Wildlife Forensic DNA Laboratory test the chicken from several fast food chains, including McDonald’s, Wendy’s, A&W, Tim Hortons and Subway. Most of the scores were between 85 and 90 percent chicken DNA. Except at Subway. The oven roasted chicken scored 53.6 percent chicken DNA and the Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki (chicken strips) had just 42.8 percent chicken DNA, according to the CBC Marketplace investigation. ... So what else is in the meat? According to the DNA testing, it’s soy.

Cops caught a suspect Saturday in the murder of Karina ­Vetrano, the beautiful jogger whose brutal strangulation last summer — in the high weeds of Spring Creek Park in Queens — had transfixed the city. Officials did not immediately release the name of the suspect, but sources told The Post he is in his 20s and lives in a housing project in East New York, Brooklyn, a neighborhood just west of her home in Howard Beach. The suspect had been on police radar for a while, sources told The Post.

Authorities say familial DNA was used to solve the 1976 killing of the ex-wife of The Righteous Brothers singer Bill Medley. Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell said Monday that investigators blame Kenneth Eugene Troyer for the slaying. Karen Klaas was strangled with her pantyhose in her home. Investigators say they collected a DNA sample from the coroner and matched it to forensic evidence from the crime scene. McDonnell says investigators ran a forensic sample collected at the crime scene through a state database and found a familial match to identify a close male relative of Troyer’s. Police in California...

oden268 8 months ago · 188k reads New DNA Study Shows Humans Bred With Unknown Species Denisovans interbred with yet another extinct population that lived in Asia more than 30,000 years ago — one that is neither human nor Neanderthal.Updated genome sequences from two extinct relatives of modern humans suggest that these ‘archaic’ groups bred with humans and with each other more extensively than was previously known.The ancient genomes, one from a Neanderthal and one from a member of an archaic human group called the Denisovans, were presented at a meeting on ancient DNA at the Royal Society in...

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department investigators on Monday will announce that they have solved the 1976 slaying of Karen Klaas, a Hermosa Beach mother of two and the ex-wife of singer Bill Medley of The Righteous Brothers. The case was solved through the use of “familial DNA,” which identified the killer, the department said in a statement Friday. Detectives, forensic and law enforcement officers will hold a news conference on Monday, the 41st anniversary of the crime. Klaas, 32, was found in her Hermosa Beach home on Jan. 30, 1976. She had been sexually assaulted, choked and left unconscious. In...