Free Republic

Former Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) DNA analyst Yvonne "Missy" Woods pleaded guilty to four felonies (cybercrime, perjury, attempting to influence a public servant and forgery). She faces 8 to 16 years in prison, bringing an end to a scandal that impacted more than 1,000 criminal cases across the state. Woods was a forensic scientist with the CBI during the 1996 murder of 6-year-old JonBenét Ramsey and was tied to evidence files in the case. Unidentified foreign male DNA found on the child's clothing has historically been used to clear the Ramsey family, but has yet to identify a perpetrator....

...Although the researchers found traces of ancient human DNA in one pigmented calcite crust sampled in Escoural Cave (Portugal), to their surprise they also found ancient human DNA in several nonpigmented parts of the cave wall in Escoural as well as in Covarón Cave (northern Spain), which had initially been sampled as negative controls.The study shows that human DNA can be preserved on cave walls long after the populations that visited the cave have disappeared...Of the 54 samples collected, only five yielded authentic ancient human mitochondrial DNA...two of these samples showed no detectable faunal mitochondrial DNA, a rare finding that...

Scientists have uncovered a disturbing change in both mice and rats infesting America's biggest cities, making the rodents harder to kill than ever before. Researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey found the vast majority of smaller house mice and larger brown rats in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Washington DC have genetically mutated to become more resilient to poison. Specifically, five out of every six rodents tested displayed at least one mutation in the Vkorc1 gene, which has been found to affect how well the poisons work. This study of nearly 300 house mice and brown rats also...

A 55-year-old Long Beach man has been arrested and charged with kidnapping in a case that dates back nearly four decades, after newly-analyzed DNA evidence identified him as a suspect, Ventura County authorities said. Bobby Rollins, Jr. has been charged with kidnapping with intent to commit robbery, with enhancements for allegedly using a firearm, and that the crime involved great violence and the victim was particularly vulnerable when the crime was committed. "If convicted of all charges and special enhancements, Rollins could be sentenced to life in prison," said Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko during a news conference Thursday....

According to a statement released by the University of York, analysis of grape seeds recovered from mud at the bottom of wells carved into the rock at the Etruscan and Roman site of Cetamura del Chianti suggests that vintners there cloned vines that produced white berries. Oya Inanli of the University of York said that a majority of the seeds in the study were dated to between 300 B.C. and A.D. 300 and belonged to this single variety of grape. After the Romans conquered central Italy, new varieties of grapes were introduced to the site. The study also showed that...

Editing the genes of a human embryo remains highly controversial, particularly after Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world eight years ago by doing just that using the popular gene-editing technique CRISPR — and then allowing the embryos to be carried to term and born. Proponents say the tech could allow us to treat diseases in powerful new ways, while critics liken it to eugenics, arguing it could set a dangerous precedent by allowing parents to select certain desirable traits. It should therefore come to no surprise that the most recent attempt to edit human zygotes, embryos at their earliest...

A son who was told his ‘missing’ dad had died more than 40 years ago has exhumed the body – and found they buried the WRONG person. Mark Wells, 52, has spent decades wondering what really happened to his dad, Dale Wayne Wells, who disappeared aged 38 in February 1985. After becoming frustrated at a lack of answers from the authorities, he paid to get his dad’s remains exhumed in the hope that new DNA could help solve the mystery. But Mark was stunned when the results came back — and revealed the man he buried and mourned as a...

David Walker from Norfolk, Va., was 19 years old when Japanese torpedoes sunk his battleship at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Walker was presumed dead following the attack on the Hawaii naval base, but his body was never recovered — that is, until recently. Officials announced on Thursday that Walker's remains were finally accounted for, thanks to scientists at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) whose mission is to recover and return missing service members from past conflicts. In a news release, the DPAA said that in 2018, military officials exhumed the unidentified remains of 25 people who were from Walker's...

Is it free woolly? Scientists were flabbergasted after discovering that the mammoth backbones that had been housed in an Alaskan museum for 70 years actually belonged to a whale, per a study published in the Journal of Quaternary Science. This archaeological case of mistaken identity began way back in the 1950s, when archaeologist Otto Geist happened upon some bones while traveling through the Alaskan interior, roughly 10 miles North of Fairbanks in a region formerly known as Beringia, The Smithsonian Magazine reported. He assumed the remnants, a pair of growth plates, belonged to the plush pachyderm mammoth based on their...

TUCSON, Ariz. (KVOA) — A 79-year-old woman has been arrested and charged in connection with a 1975 cold case. According to the Pima County Sheriff's Department, Carol Ann Beall, 79, was arrested on May 28. PCSD Homicide and Cold Case Unit detectives located the woman in the 7800 block of N. Starr Grass Drive. She faces a first-degree murder charge in the 1975 death of 73-year-old William Reginald Sipfle. Play Video Carol Ann Beall, 79, has been arrested and charged in connection with a 1975 cold case. The victim was identified as 73-year-old William Reginald Sipfle. In October 1975, a...

In A Nutshell A single octopus collected nearly a mile deep near the Galápagos Islands has been identified as a new species, Microeledone galapagensis, overturning a recent definition that placed its entire family exclusively in the cold Southern Ocean. Small enough to fit in the palm of a hand and vivid blue on top with a deep purple-to-maroon underside, the animal displays an unusual reversed color pattern that extends inside its body, a feature researchers think may help hide the glow of bioluminescent prey. Because the DNA samples were lost and no second specimen has been collected, the entire species...

Since humans developed the ability to study DNA extracted from fossils, we have uncovered a mystery that until now had no answer. In the DNA of some human species, including our own, Homo sapiens, there were "super-archaic" markers, vestiges of older, unknown species with which we had interbred and produced offspring. Unable to determine who these genomic intruders were, some scientists called them ghost populations...Researchers in China have analysed proteins from the tooth enamel of six fossils dating back around 400,000 years -- five men and one woman -- found at sites across much of the country from north to...

“Backward evolution” spawns ape-like people Feb. 21, 2006 Special to World Science An editor of a noted scientific journal says he has discovered a genetic defect that seems to set back the clock on human evolution by more than a million years.     Walking patterns of victims of Uner Tan syndrome. (Courtesy Uner Tan) Its victims walk on all fours and mouth a primitive language, the scientist reported. He added that the syndrome may literally undo eons of human evolution, and thus reflect with some accuracy what our ape-like ancestors were like. The researcher, Uner Tan of Cukurova University...

A U.S. Navy sailor who died at age 17 aboard the battleship USS West Virginia during the 1941 Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor will be buried May 30 in his Arkansas hometown. Fireman 3rd Class Royle Luker will be buried with full military honors at New Bethel Cemetery in Plainview, where he was raised before enlisting in June 1941, according to a Navy news release Wednesday. He was the son of George Luker, a World War I veteran, and Nettie Estelle David Luker. He is survived by two nephews and a niece, according to his obituary on the Cornwell...

Charlotte Heimann, a 27-year-old mother with ties to Clermont County, Ohio, disappeared on Oct. 30, 1981, after leaving the Rochester Psychiatric Center in New York. More than four decades later, her granddaughter, Shyla Jump, is working to uncover what happened. "I didn’t actually know the story behind it. I didn’t actually know my grandmother. I didn’t know who she was until now," Jump said. Charlotte left her 4-year-old daughter, Jump’s mother, with her own mother in Ohio while she moved to New York to be closer to her father and attend Monroe College. Records and family accounts describe Charlotte's struggles...

A genetic study of the remains of four 2,000-year-old dogs recovered from two archaeological sites on the Korean Peninsula suggests that the canines belonged to a lineage separate from other dog populations in East Asia, according to the Korea JoongAng Daily. It had been previously thought that dog populations in East Asian shared a single lineage. Hyeongcheol Kim of the Gaya National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage, Suyeon Kim and A-reum Yu of the National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage, and their colleagues determined that ancient Korean dogs resembled the Australian dingo and the New Guinea singing dog. Korean dogs...

As scientists study Earth's oceans, they come across some intriguing mysteries. Among them are some of the strangest deep-sea discoveries, including a "golden orb" measuring about 4 inches in diameter in the Gulf of Alaska in 2023. Referred to as a "yellow hat" by one of the videographers at the time, researchers were stumped about what it could be; coral, an egg casing, or a dead sponge attachment were some of the initial guesses. Since then, they've been able to determine that it's dead cell remains from a huge deep-sea anemone. The golden specimen was found about 2 miles beneath...

Ancient DNA extracted from human remains in Peru shows that long-distance migration along the Pacific coast began centuries before the Inca Empire expanded into the region. A study published in Nature Communications traces this movement to at least the 13th century, offering new insight into how coastal communities formed and connected long before any imperial force arrived. Jacob L. Bongers, an archaeologist at the University of Sydney and lead author of the study, analyzed genome-wide data from 21 individuals buried in the Chincha Valley of southern Peru. The results show that early inhabitants carried genetic ancestry from populations living about...

After 40 years, police made an arrest in the rape and stabbing death of Roberta Walls. Charles Randall Berry, the 66-year-old suspect, was arrested Monday in Newington, Connecticut. Virginia Beach police said advancements in technology combined with investigative work helped detectives solve the case. ... In the spring of 1986, the body of Walls, a 22-year-old volunteer at the Bayside Area Library, was found on a baseball field behind Old Donation School, near Independence Boulevard north of Town Center.

Could this bring species back from egg-stinction? Texas firm Colossal Biosciences, which has dedicated itself to resurrecting lost species, including the dire wolf and woolly mammoth, has hatched live chicks from an artificial egg for the first time — a crucial, “Jurassic Park”-esque step in its mission to bring back the moa and other giant, long-gone avians. The first-of-its-kind artificial egg allows a bird embryo to develop completely outside of a biological shell while scientists oversee every aspect from early embryo to hatching. The team hatched 26 “healthy” chickens, which “will live out their natural lives” at the company’s avian...