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For a purebred dog and, on occasion, even a first-generation hybrid, breed-inference services often just confirm what the dog owner already knows. Sometimes a pedigree is available, tracing back through multiple generations of purebred ancestors and providing essentially complete information about the pet’s ancestry. In other cases, an owner’s extensive experience leads to correct intuition that ears that floppy together with a nose that keen must indicate complete or near-complete beagle ancestry. By contrast, when applied to investigate the ancestry of a mutt, DNA-based inference often yields surprising conclusions.

SACRAMENTO - DNA is back in the spotlight, cracking cold cases. But questions are being raised after the state spent decades collecting the DNA of infants without parents realizing it. California has been collecting newborn blood samples since 1983. Many parents were shocked to hear their children’s blood is being stored in a state database, and possibly even sold to outside researchers. Pricking the toes newborns, to test their blood for certain disorders. The remaining blood becomes “property of the state,” and could be shared with outside researchers. “I feel like that’s something that should have been discussed with us,...

Nearly half of the Democratic National Committee's staff are now people of color and 51 percent are women, according to a new report to be published by the DNC Monday. The report was prepared as the party responds to criticism that it has taken minority voters for granted while overlooking them for jobs and contracts. The DNC became more diverse as it staffed back up after its post-2016 election lull, seeing a big jump in the number of Latinos (from 5 to 22) and smaller increases in the number of African-Americans (from 22 to 30), Asian-American/Pacific Islanders and LGBTQ people...

There's an extremely serious dump of emails that came from Wikileaks exposing Hillary Clinton for ordering top US Diplomats to steal the DNA and passwords from United Nations leadership. The stunning email comes from the account of Hillary Clinton that used the address “hdr22@clintonemail.com”.

In June 1995, Monica Lewinsky’s move to Washington, D.C., was unremarkable. She was a 21-year-old recent college grad with an unpaid internship in the office of President Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, landed with the help of a family connection. But, as the nation later learned, things happened quickly from that point, as it was that year that she began a relationship with the President that would last about two years and lead to an epoch-shaping scandal. The relationship between Lewinsky and President Clinton came to light 20 years ago, and the fallout would dominate 1998’s news. And...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — The genealogy website used to find the man accused of being California's Golden State Killer had no idea its database was tapped in pursuit of a suspect who eluded law enforcement for four decades, the site co-founder said Friday. Authorities never approached Florida-based GEDmatch about the case, and Curtis Rogers said law enforcement's use of the site raised privacy concerns that were echoed by civil liberties groups. The free genealogy website, which pools DNA profiles that people upload and share publicly to find relatives, said it has always informed users its database can be used for...

SACRAMENTO — The Golden State Killer raped and murdered victims all across the state of California in an era before Google searches and social media, a time when the police relied on shoe leather, not cellphone records or big data. But it was technology that got him. The suspect, Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, was arrested by the police on Tuesday. Investigators accuse him of committing more than 50 rapes and 12 murders. Investigators used DNA from crime scenes and plugged that genetic profile into a commercial online genealogy database. They found distant relatives of Mr. DeAngelo’s and traced their DNA...

The words, emblazoned on two signs that hang off U.S. Senate candidate Shiva Ayyadurai's campaign bus, appear next to two images: one of a stoic Ayyadurai looking into the camera, and another of a closeup of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren wearing a Native American headdress. Ayyadurai, a 54-year-old scientist born in Bombay, India, told the Washington Times the city of Camridge, Mass., had ordered him to remove the signs because they were placed "without approvals and permits." He believes this was instead a case of the city trying to clamp down on his right to free speech. “This is a...

It's not just the double helix! For the first time, scientists have identified the existence of a new DNA structure never before seen in living cells. The discovery of what's described as a 'twisted knot' of DNA in living cells confirms our complex genetic code is crafted with more intricate symmetry than just the double helix structure everybody associates with DNA – and the forms these molecular variants take affect how our biology functions. "When most of us think of DNA, we think of the double helix," says antibody therapeutics researcher Daniel Christ from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research...

One of the things I fuss about a lot (especially at Buffer) are words—very simple words, in fact. Should it say “Hi” or “Hey?” Should it be “cheers” or “thanks?” How about “but” or “and?” There are many occasions when Joel and I sit over one line and change it multiple times, until we feel it really sits right. This is partly to improve our metrics for click rate and others. It is also to simply create the right emotion. The one key question we ask ourselves is: “How does this make you feel?” The question might sound very...

Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen will meet former US President Bill Clinton in Copenhagen on Wednesday, the Prime Minister’s Office has confirmed. Clinton will be shown around Christiansborg, the seat of Denmark’s parliament, before one-to-one talks with Rasmussen, the PM’s office confirmed in a press statement. […] He is scheduled to give a keynote speech at a summit held by the Presidents Institute foundation in the Danish capital on Wednesday, with up to 3,000 European leaders expected to attend. …

Amid efforts to find alien life, scientists have not yet confirmed the existence of an extraterrestrial civilization. Findings of a new study suggest this has something do with the element phosphorus lacking in the cosmos. Life-Giving PhosphorusPhosphorus is the 11th most common element on Earth, and it is fundamental to all living things. Phosphorus is one of only six chemical elements on our planet that organisms depend on. "[Phosphorus] helps form the backbone of the long chains of nucleotides that create RNA and DNA; it is part of the phospholipids in cell membranes; and is a building block of the...

In 2016, NASA sequenced DNA in space for the first time, but alien life, we may soon discover, may be vastly different on other planets and moons, particularly as we expand our efforts to explore ocean worlds with our solar system and beyond. “Most strategies for life detection rely upon finding features known to be associated with Earth's life, such as particular classes of molecules,” the researchers wrote. DNA and RNA are the building blocks of life on Earth, but the molecules of life might differ substantially on another planet. A new paper by scientists at Georgetown University, published online...

Ready for a world in which a $50 DNA test can predict your odds of earning a PhD or forecast which toddler gets into a selective preschool? Robert Plomin, a behavioral geneticist, says that’s exactly what’s coming. For decades genetic researchers have sought the hereditary factors behind intelligence, with little luck. But now gene studies have finally gotten big enough—and hence powerful enough—to zero in on genetic differences linked to IQ. A year ago, no gene had ever been tied to performance on an IQ test. Since then, more than 500 have, thanks to gene studies involving more than 200,000...

In the early 19th century, Jean-François Champollion used the Rosetta Stone to begin the process of deciphering the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt. We already knew Egypt through the Bible and the histories of the Greeks, but even Herodotus wrote 2,000 years after the beginning of the Old Kingdom. With the translation of hieroglyphics, the legend of Egypt came to life. What had been cloudy became clear. In Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard’s Medical School and the Broad Institute, introduces us to...

Former White House intern Monica Lewinsky is calling for a “cultural revolution” in how people consume online news so that “more shame" no longer means “more clicks” and more advertising income. Lewinsky told hundreds of privacy professionals Tuesday “we need to communicate online with compassion, consume news with compassion, and click with compassion." "Just imagine walking a mile in someone else’s headline," she said in a Washington speech that was contractually closed to the press.

Burials from a cave in Morocco have yielded the oldest human DNA evidence yet from Africa, offering new insight into Stone Age migrations. The DNA samples come from one of the most ancient cemeteries in the world, the Grotte des Pigeons, near the village of Taforalt in northeast Morocco. Beginning around 15,000 years ago, a culture of hunter-gatherers buried their dead with animal horns and other adornments inside this cave. Though burials were found as recently as 2006, archaeologists have been excavating the cave since the 1940s. The name 20th-century researchers gave to this culture —the Iberomaurusians—reflects the theory that...

A more sustainable pint of craft beer possibly coming to a pub near you +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Hoppy beer is all the rage among craft brewers and beer lovers, and now UC Berkeley biologists have come up with a way to create these unique flavors and aromas without using hops. The researchers created strains of brewer's yeast that not only ferment the beer but also provide two of the prominent flavor notes provided by hops. In double-blind taste tests, employees of Lagunitas Brewing Company in Petaluma, California, characterized beer made from the engineered strains as more hoppy than a control beer...

[A]rticles claiming that the mission activated Kelly's “space genes,” that 7 percent of his genes didn't return to normal post-spaceflight, and that he and Mark are no longer identical twins..... these stories are biologically impossible. If 7 percent of Kelly's genome was altered, he would be about as different from a human as a rhesus monkey. ... Your genome dwells inside the nuclei of your cells. Think of it as an instruction manual: It is the complete set of DNA that describes the form and function of every aspect of your being, with each gene pertaining to a particular task life requires. But this manual...

Modern humans co-existed and interbred not only with Neanderthals, but also with another species of archaic humans, the mysterious Denisovans.