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This is the first ancient DNA to be obtained from Phoenician remains. Known as “Ariche,” the young man came from Byrsa, a walled citadel above the harbor of ancient Carthage. Byrsa was attacked by the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus “Africanus” in the Third Punic War. It was destroyed by Rome in 146 B.C. Analysis of the skeleton revealed the man died between the age of 19 and 24, had a rather robust physique and was 1.7 meters (5’6″) tall. He may have belonged to the Carthaginian elite, as he was buried with gems, scarabs, amulets and other artifacts. Now genetic...

We asked several Muslims in Saudi Arabia why they marry their first cousins. All of them told us it’s to keep the wealth within the family and that the Prophet allows them to do this. There is one town in Saudi Arabia where there are only two last names listed for all its citizens. This came from a Lockheed employee who has had three assignments to Saudi Arabia. Worth the read! During the pilot transition program with the KV-107 and C-130 with Lockheed, we found that most Saudi pilot trainees had very limited night vision, even on the brightest of...

Animal behaviorist Dr. Kale Crumlin didn't know how close he was to the truth when a few months ago he first shared his observations with a small circle of colleagues in a paper titled, "The Behavior and Habits of Hillary Clinton," in which he compared the former First Lady to the dominant female in a clan of spotted hyenas, also known as laughing hyenas. "The cackle, the facial expressions, and the predisposition to dominate males were the first behavioral clues," wrote Dr. Crumlin, referring to a known scientific fact that spotted hyena society is matriarchal; females are larger than males...

An impressive array of brainpower —“Fat? Blame your genes, say doctors” —“Overweight? Maybe you really can blame your genes” —“Blame your genes for obesity” Headlines such as these have become a staple of science and health journalism. Are they right? Are obese people really helpless victims of their genes? Let us begin by distinguishing between “monogenic” obesity and what scientists call “common” obesity. Monogenic obesity, as the name implies, is caused by a mutation in a single gene, which is inherited in a Mendelian fashion, just as conditions such as sickle-cell anemia and cystic fibrosis are. In the case of...

The call for action from scientists in the UK, US, Europe and Australia reflects a growing consensus among experts that frequent cannabis use can increase the risk of psychosis...In the UK, cannabis is the most popular illegal drug, and according to Public Health England data, more young people enter treatment centres for help with cannabis than any other drug, alcohol included.

23 & Me dot com advertises for you to send in a genetic sample, and to receive specialized medical advice in return. What is the potential for government & corporate violation of your medical records privacy rights, potentially denying you employment, life insurance, medical services on the basis of "futility" owing to pre-existing conditions? Google query 23 and me medical spying.

It’s a subject doctors, health providers and medical experts are discussing feverishly, but often quietly: Whether parents should undergo genetic tests, either before conception or after, to determine if their unborn child might have a serious genetic disorder. Hanging over the debate is the specter of eugenics—fears that the ability to manipulate the health of our future babies could devalue the sanctity of life.

One whole endogenous retrovirus genome -- and bits of 17 others -- were spotted in a study of 2,500 human genomes... Nineteen new pieces of DNA -- left by viruses that first infected our ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago -- have just been found, lurking between our own genes. And one stretch of newfound DNA, found in about 50 of the 2,500 people studied, contains an intact, full genetic recipe for an entire virus, say the scientists who published their findings today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Whether or not it can replicate, or...

Social scientists generally, and criminologists especially, often lack the ability (usually due to both ethical and practical concerns) to perform randomized controlled trials, the gold standard of research. We might expect, for instance, that having low levels of self-control is a cause of criminal behavior. In fact, some of the most powerful explanations of crime have been built on this idea, and there is much evidence to support it. We might also hypothesize that bad parenting causes children to develop low levels of self-control. Yet we can’t randomly assign people to have different levels of self-control, and we most assuredly...

Lev Landau, a Nobelist and one of the fathers of a great school of Soviet physics, had a logarithmic scale for ranking theorists, from 1 to 5. A physicist in the first class had ten times the impact of someone in the second class, and so on. He modestly ranked himself as 2.5 until late in life, when he became a 2. In the first class were Heisenberg, Bohr, and Dirac among a few others. Einstein was a 0.5! My friends in the humanities, or other areas of science like biology, are astonished and disturbed that physicists and mathematicians (substitute...

Ever since geneticists sequenced the first Neanderthal genome in 2010, researchers have been reporting just how related humans are to their ancient, extinct cousins. Since then, there's been more research. And more. And more. As it turns out, non-African modern humans have Neanderthals to thank for 1 to 4 percent of their DNA. The two species were thought to have interbred around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, based on the Neanderthal DNA found in anatomically modern human specimens and people living today. But scientists had yet to find a signature of such mating interactions in Neanderthal DNA, until now. "Instead...

The present-day English owe about a third of their ancestry to the Anglo-Saxons, according to a new study. Scientists sequenced genomes from 10 skeletons unearthed in eastern England and dating from the Iron Age through to the Anglo-Saxon period. Many of the Anglo-Saxon samples appeared closer to modern Dutch and Danish people than the Iron Age Britons did. The results appear in Nature Communications journal. According to historical accounts and archaeology, the Anglo-Saxons migrated to Britain from continental Europe from the 5th Century AD. They brought with them a new culture, social structure and language. Genetic studies have tackled the...

If you didn’t expect this to be a yes-or-no question, you’re not alone. Male brains do seem to be built differently than female brains. An analysis of more than 100 studies found that the volume of a man’s brain is 8% to 13% greater than the volume of a woman’s brain, on average. Some of the most noticeable differences were in areas of the brain that control language, memory, emotion and behavior, according to a 2014 report in the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. To find out whether these structural differences translated into cognitive differences, scientists examined detailed brain scans...

The human brain may be the most complex piece of organized matter in the known universe, but Allen Institute researchers have begun to unravel the genetic code underlying its function. Research published this month in Nature Neuroscience identified a surprisingly small set of molecular patterns that dominate gene expression in the human brain and appear to be common to all individuals, providing key insights into the core of the genetic code that makes our brains distinctly human. "So much research focuses on the variations between individuals, but we turned that question on its head to ask, what makes us similar?"...

Inbreeding is common in Islamic culture. It’s been going on since Mohammed sanctioned first-cousin marriages 1,400 years ago. I guess there’s nothing like getting marriage advice handed down from one generation to the next that originated with a lunatic pedophile. PJ Media reports that because Mohammed encouraged inbreeding, many Muslims regard intermarriage as part of their religion. First-cousin marriages are also viewed as a source of social status, as a means of keeping wealth within the family, and as a form of control. In addition, it is a vehicle to safeguard families against the influence of non-Muslim outsiders, which contributes...

Beagles named Hercules, at left, and Tiangou are the world’s first gene-edited dogs. =============================================================================================================================== Man’s best friend is now his newest genetic engineering project. Scientists in China say they are the first to use gene editing to produce customized dogs. They created a beagle with double the amount of muscle mass by deleting a gene called myostatin. The dogs have “more muscles and are expected to have stronger running ability, which is good for hunting, police (military) applications,” Liangxue Lai, a researcher with the Key Laboratory of Regenerative Biology at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, said in an...

The U.N.'s dream of Sustainable Development is precisely a Brave New World It was just a matter of time before Eugenics met Climate Change. Even if it sounds like science fiction and absurd speculation, the discussion is taking place now in scientific circles. In fact, this is the ultimate application of science to the human condition. For instance, designer babies might be genetically engineered to be smaller as adults: This would proportionally reduce their carbon footprint. Or genes might be inserted to improve night vision. That would allow nighttime lighting requirements to be reduced, thus saving boatloads of energy and...

Scientists say they have extracted ancient DNA from the skull of a man buried in the highlands of Ethiopia 4,500 years ago that supports the theory that Eurasian farmers migrated into Africa some 3,000 years ago. This Stone Age resettlement had previously been theorized, but the rare find allowed scientists to see what DNA looked like well before the time the migration would have taken place. A comparison with modern populations around the world allowed them to see that the migrants left their genetic mark in the furthest corners of Africa. "This is the first ancient human genome found in...

The prevailing social dogma of our time — that economic and other disparities among groups are strange, if not sinister — has set off bitter disputes between those who blame genetic differences and those who blame discrimination. Both sides ignore the possibility that the groups themselves may differ in their orientations, their priorities, and in what they are prepared to sacrifice for the sake of other things. Back in the early 19th century, an official of the Russian Empire reported that even the poorest Jews saw to it that their daughters could read, and their homes had at least ten...

Scientists have finally figured out how the key gene tied to obesity makes people fat, a major discovery that could open the door to an entirely new approach to the problem beyond diet and exercise. The work solves a big mystery: Since 2007, researchers have known that a gene called FTO was related to obesity, but they didn’t know how, and could not tie it to appetite or other known factors. Now experiments reveal that a faulty version of the gene causes energy from food to be stored as fat rather than burned. Genetic tinkering in mice and on human...