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Despite what you might've seen in 1950s monster movies, it's difficult to raise mutant ants. For years biologists have altered the genetics of organisms as varied as mice and rice. Mutant fruit flies are a laboratory staple. But ants' complex life cycle hampered efforts to grow genetically engineered ants — until now.

DNA is shedding light on the people who built Greece's earliest civilizations. Researchers analysed genetic data from skeletons dating to the Bronze Age, a period marked by the emergence of writing, complex urban planning and magnificent art and architecture. These ancient Aegean people were mostly descended from farmers who had settled the region thousands of years earlier. But they showed signs of genetic - and possibly cultural - contact with people to the north and to the east. Dr Iosif Lazaridis, from Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts, and colleagues focussed on burials from the Minoan civilization, which flourished on the...

The University of Iowa’s student newspaper has announced the discovery of a special privilege which intelligent people acquire as an accident of birth. This new privilege — called “cognitive privilege” — functions in essentially the same way as white privilege. The Daily Iowan revealed the discovery of this new privilege earlier this week. Garden-variety white privilege “is an important topic that deserves a public discussion,” the op-ed on “cognitive privilege” explains, but it is also “prudent to at least mention the wider concept contained therein: that of privilege itself.” Privilege in general is “the receipt of certain benefits wholly through...

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, Technology Review has learned. The effort, led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health and Science University, involved changing the DNA of a large number of one-cell embryos with the gene-editing technique CRISPR, according to people familiar with the scientific results. Until now, American scientists have watched with a combination of awe, envy, and some alarm as scientists elsewhere were first to explore the controversial practice. To date, three previous reports of editing human embryos...

Early in 2017, ABC breathlessly reported, “Hair loss and balding are something we associate with aging, not a younger population, yet more and more millennials say they're experiencing hair loss.” Theories include diet and health problems. But Moneyish.com didn't hesitate to conclude: “Millennials are going bald from too much stress.” We live in a rich, safe, successful country. Why is there so much stress? Why do so many young people feel they are under siege and about to be overrun? Perhaps we should look at what public schools, in tandem with higher education and the media, tend to emphasize. Namely,...

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...

“Stop right there,” read the text from one of my production crew. I had just sent over the show prep topics for my Saturday Evening broadcast and the headline of the first story up had caused him to literally stop in his tracks. In a sense of disbelief the producers of my show googled “pregnant man gives birth.” Even though the story was less than a day old, more than a million hits in Google news popped up: It wasn’t restricted to British press and it certainly swept the world of “journalism” (however yellow it will come to be known...

Many a celebrity has sought to further boost their credentials by revealing they are descended from kings and queens on genealogy programmes. But according to a leading geneticist, their boasts are nothing special – because we are all related to royalty.

Zero times anything is zero. The odds of life just happening by chance are zero. This universe just springing into being by chance is impossible. It takes a leap of blind faith to believe in evolution, unguided or guided. Of course, there are tiny changes within kinds. It seems to me usually when the evolutionists make their case, they point to these tiny changes. The analogies to the improbability of evolution by a random process are endless. A hurricane blows through a junkyard and assembles a fully functioning 747 jet. Scrabble pieces are randomly spilled out on the board, and...

In a significant advance in the study of mental ability, a team of European and American scientists announced on Monday that they had identified 52 genes linked to intelligence in nearly 80,000 people. These genes do not determine intelligence, however. Their combined influence is minuscule, the researchers said, suggesting that thousands more are likely to be involved and still await discovery. Just as important, intelligence is profoundly shaped by the environment. Still, the findings could make it possible to begin new experiments into the biological basis of reasoning and problem-solving, experts said. They could even help researchers determine which interventions...

Here’s the 1996 clip from “Bill Nye the Science Guy” which is currently being censored on Netflix During the original 1996 broadcast of the “Probability” episode of the TV program “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” there was a segment that explained how a person’s gender is determined by genetics.In 2017, Netflix aired a version of this episode in which this segment had been removed.I don’t know if it was Netflix, Nye himself, or some other party that instigated this censorship.Since YouTube has a nasty habit of removing politically incorrect videos, I’m including links to four videos, all of which have the...

When uploaded to Netflix, an episode of the educational children's show "Bill Nye the Science Guy" cut out a segment saying that chromosomes determine one's gender. In the original episode, titled "Probability," a young woman told viewers, "I'm a girl. Could have just as easily been a boy, though, because the probability of becoming a girl is always 1 in 2." "See, inside each of our cells are these things called chromosomes, and they control whether we become a boy or a girl, " the young woman continued. "See, there are only two possibilities: XX, a girl, or XY, a...

Lucy Languishes as a Human-Ape Link by Frank Sherwin, M.A. * Evidence for Creation Human evolution has consistently been shown to be without scientific or biblical merit. Although a parade of supposed transitions are displayed in every conceivable outlet, non-Darwinists maintain that the links between people and our alleged ape-like ancestors are—missing.

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...

NASA is set to use a radical new 'tricorder' DNA sequencer to work out what a mysterious fungus found growing on the International Space Station is. Astronauts have reported funding the strange microbial growths on walls and surfaces, and it has even clogged waterlines. Now, two instruments onboard will be used to analyse it in orbit, allowing mission controllers to work out how to deal with it

In a significant advance toward creating the first “designer” complex cell, scientists say they are one-third of the way to synthesizing the complete genome of baker's yeast. In seven studies published Thursday in the journal Science, the researchers describe how they built six of the 16 chromosomes required for the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, altering the genetic material to edit out some genes and write in new characteristics.

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...

Modern Aboriginal Australians are the descendants of a single founding population that arrived in Australia 50,000 years ago, while Australia was still connected to New Guinea. Populations then spread rapidly -- within 1500-2000 years -- around the east and west coasts of Australia, meeting somewhere in South Australia. DNA in hair samples collected from Aboriginal people across Australia in the early to mid-1900s has revealed that populations have been continuously present in the same regions for up to 50,000 years -- soon after the peopling of Australia. Published in the journal Nature, the findings reinforce Aboriginal communities' strong connection to...

....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...