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Short man robs bank in supermarket FALLBROOK, Calif. — A diminutive man in sunglasses robbed a North County supermarket banking desk Friday, authorities reported. The thief, who appeared to be in his early 30s, handed a demand note to a teller at the U.S. Bank office at the Albertsons store in the 1100 block of South Mission Road in Fallbrook shortly after 10 a.m., according to the FBI. The bandit fled with an undisclosed amount of money. Witnesses described him as a roughly 5-foot-4-inch, 110-pound white man with short brown hair, freckles and protruding ears. The same man is believed...

What most people know about the inheritance of eye color is that brown comes from a dominant gene (needing one copy only) and blue from a recessive gene (needing two copies). University of Queensland geneticist Rick Sturm suggests that the genetics are not so clear. "There is no single gene for eye color," he says, "but the biggest effect is the OCA2 gene." This gene, which controls the amount of melanin pigment produced, accounts for about 74 percent of the total variation in people's eye color. Sturm has recently shown that the OCA2 gene itself is influenced by other genetic...

Fair skin and red hair first appeared around the time people settled in Europe and still remains a dominant gene in southern Europeans today, even if they become tanned. Known as V6OL allele, the gene made skin lighter as humans were getting less vitamin D from no longer being in the harsh African sun , the study reported. However it brought with it health risks as it is commonly associated with melanoma - a serious form of skin cancer. Researchers made the discovery while examining the evolutionary processes of particular genes of 1,000 people from Spain. Study author Dr Saioa...

~~~snip~~~ hey did a DNA test on the Cherchen man (the 3800 year old 6'6 tall dark blonde mummy and the oldest mummy found), and the beauty of Loulan (the red hair mummy), and both of these mummies contained East Asian Mongoloid DNA. Even the Chinese scientist were astonished. The Mongoloid component of the Tocharians are not from Han Chinese or pre Han Chinese, but most likely from Altaic types of Mongoloids such as Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Mongolians. This obviously indicates that the Tocharians were already mixed for quite a few generations, since they looked mostly Caucasian. Very interesting....

Denmark Sperm bank turns down redheads The world's largest sperm bank has started turning down redheaded donors because there is too little demand for their sperm. By Richard Orange 4:41PM BST 16 Sep 2011 Ole Schou, Cryos's director, said that there had been a surge in donations in recent years, allowing the facility to become much more picky about its donors. "There are too many redheads in relation to demand," he told told Danish newspaper Ekstrabladet. "I do not think you chose a redhead, unless the partner - for example, the sterile male - has red hair, or because the...

Nobody likes going to the dentist, but redheads may have good reason. A growing body of research shows that people with red hair need larger doses of anesthesia and often are resistant to local pain blockers like Novocaine. As a result, redheads tend to be particularly nervous about dental procedures and are twice as likely to avoid going to the dentist as people with other hair colors, according to new research published in The Journal of the American Dental Association. Researchers believe redheads are more sensitive to pain because of a mutation in a gene that affects hair color. In...

The gene known as MC1R suggests the Neanderthals had fair skin and even freckles like redheads. After analysing the fossil bones found in a cave in north-west Spain, the experts concluded they had human blood group "O" and were genetically more likely to be fair skinned, perhaps even with freckles, have red or ginger hair and could talk... The report, published in BMC Evolutionary Biology, concludes that: "These results suggest the genetic change responsible for the O blood group in humans predates the human and Neanderthal divergence" but came "after humans separated from their common ancestor ... chimpanzees." ...One gene...

DNA reveals Neanderthal redheadsNeanderthals’ pigmentation possibly as varied as humans’, scientists say By Steve BradtWith Neanderthals’ surviving bones providing few clues, scientists have long sought to flesh out the appearance of this hominid species. Illustration created by Knut Finstermeier, Neanderthal reconstruction by the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museum Mannheim Ancient DNA retrieved from the bones of two Neanderthals suggests that at least some of them had red hair and pale skin, scientists report this week in the journal Science. The international team says that Neanderthals’ pigmentation may even have been as varied as that of modern humans, and that at least 1 percent of...

What would it have been like to meet a Neandertal? Researchers have hypothesized answers for decades, seeking to put flesh on ancient bones. But fossils are silent on many traits, from hair and skin color to speech and personality. Personality will have to wait, but in a paper published online in Science this week (www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1147417), an international team announces that it has extracted a pigmentation gene, mc1r, from the bones of two Neandertals. The researchers conclude that at least some Neandertals had pale skin and red hair, similar to some of the Homo sapiens who today inhabit their European homeland....

DEPRESSING news in the September edition of National Geographic: redheads are becoming rarer and could become extinct - some experts say the last redhead could be born by 2060. Others say the redhead gene can disappear for a generation or two in a family and reappear... ...the proportion of the world's population with natural red hair is down to 2per cent... On every level, that's surely a tragedy. Before we let this rare and precious species go, has anyone considered what it might be like to live in a world without redheaded women? ...Groucho Marx once admitted... "I don't know...

Ancient DNA retrieved from the bones of two Neanderthals suggests that at least some of them had red hair and pale skin, scientists report this week in the journal Science. The international team says that Neanderthals' pigmentation may even have been as varied as that of modern humans, and that at least 1 percent of Neanderthals were likely redheads. The scientists -- led by Holger Römpler of Harvard University and the University of Leipzig, Carles Lalueza-Fox of the University of Barcelona, and Michael Hofreiter of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig -- extracted, amplified, and sequenced a...

REDHEADS are becoming rarer and could be extinct in 100 years, according to genetic scientists. The current National Geographic magazine reports that less than two per cent of the world's population has natural red hair, created by a mutation in northern Europe thousands of years ago. Global intermingling, which broadens the availability of possible partners, has reduced the chances of redheads meeting and producing little redheads of their own. It takes only one red-haired parent to produce ginger-headed babies, but two redheads obviously create a much stronger possibility. If the gingers really want to save themselves they should move to...

Their very name has become a byword for all that is brutish, stupid and crude. In the popular imagination, these were the violent, shambling, grunting apemen of legend. If you accuse someone of being a Neanderthal, you are not paying them a compliment. But Neanderthal Man, who represented one of the oddest and most mysterious chapters in the history of humanity, has been undergoing something of a makeover in recent years. We now know that these extinct cousins were not the brutes of legend but a sophisticated and intelligent species, capable of creating fire, fashioning delicate tools, burying their dead...

Stoic Redheads By AMY SULLIVAN Published: December 11, 2005 Redheads have long been portrayed in literature and art as strong-willed and fiery. Now there may be a scientific explanation for these traits. The key, according to researchers at McGill University in Montreal, is a gene that is linked both to red hair coloring and to higher levels of pain tolerance. It has been known since the mid-1990's that mutations of the MC1R gene are responsible for hair color - and fair skin and freckles - in about 70 percent of redheads. But when Jeffrey S. Mogil and his colleagues at...

Blondes might have more fun, and gentlemen may well marry brunettes, but redheads are remembered. For while they have had a troubled history - being burned as witches, sacrificed to gods and condemned as unlucky or insane, to give just a few examples, there has always been an edgy glamour attached to women with red hair, from Cleopatra to Rita Hayworth to Julianne Moore. A recent report by the Oxford Hair Foundation in the UK has caused shockwaves in the Netherlands: redheads, it says, are dying out, and could become extinct as soon as 2060. The two main factors involved...

People with ginger locks are head and shoulders above blondes or brunettes when it comes to coping with pain, researchers claim. Scientists have found that the gene responsible for flame-coloured hair also produces a morphine-type substance that acts like an anaesthetic and reduces pain. When researchers at the Medical Research Council in London introduced the gene in mice, they found the rodents could withstand more pain than normal. "Seventy per cent of redheads are redheads because a particular gene doesn't work," Prof. Jeff Mogil of Montreal's McGill University, told CTV News. "This is a gene that would otherwise give you...

She was just walking down the street with her sister, in her old neighborhood, when an elderly woman stopped her car in front of her and called out, "I love your hair! It's so beautiful!" Caitlin Tydings was about 8 then, and caught off guard. Now a high-school senior, she has since grown accustomed to strangers commenting on her strawberry-blond locks. If predictions by the Oxford Hair Foundation come to pass, the number of natural redheads everywhere will continue to dwindle until there are none left by the year 2100. The reason, according to scientists at the independent institute in...

London - Red hair may be the genetic legacy of Neanderthals, according to a new study by British scientists. Researchers at the John Radcliffe Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford were quoted by The Times as saying the so-called "ginger gene" which gives people red hair, fair skin and freckles could be up to 100 000 years old. They claim that their discovery points to the gene having originated in Neanderthal man who lived in Europe for 200 000 years before Homo sapien settlers, the ancestors of modern man, arrived from Africa about 40 000 years ago. Rosalind Harding, the...

Anthropologist Claims Humans, Neanderthals, Australopithecines All Variations on One Species   01/01/2005 According to a news story in the UK News Telegraph, all fossil hominims, including modern humans, Australopithecines, Neandertals and the recent Indonesian “hobbit man,” belong to the same species: Homo sapiens.  Reporter Robert Matthews wrote about Maciej Henneberg (U of Adelaide) and his argument, based on skull sizes and body weights for 200 fossil specimens, that all known hominim bones fit within the range of variation expected for a single species.  Henneberg made the startling claim in the Journal of Comparative Human Biology, where he said, “All hominims appear...

Siberian Graveyard's Secrets YEKATERINBURG, Russia In a medieval Siberian graveyard a few miles south of the Arctic Circle, Russian scientists have unearthed mummies roughly 1,000 years old, clad in copper masks, hoops and plates - burial rites that archaeologists say they have never seen before. . Among 34 shallow graves were five mummies shrouded in copper and blankets of reindeer, beaver, wolverine or bear fur. Unlike the remains of Egyptian pharaohs, the scientists say, the Siberian bodies were mummified by accident. The cold, dry permafrost preserved the remains, and the copper may have helped prevent oxidation. . The discovery adds...