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The initial suspect, Judith Lord's neighbor, has been found responsible for her murder.The 1975 murder of Judith Lord in New Hampshire has now been solved through modern forensic science, the state Attorney General’s Office announced Monday. On May 20, 1975, Judith “Judy” Lord, 22, was found strangled to death in her home at the Concord Garden Apartments. The buildings operations manager, who went to Lord’s apartment to collect overdue rent, entered after hearing a baby’s persistent cries and discovered Lord lying unresponsive in an upstairs bedroom with a blue plastic sauna suit covering her face, officials said. Lord’s 20-month-old son...

For some scientists, there’s no place more romantic than a cheese cave. When Tufts University biologist Benjamin Wolfe, then a biology postdoc, shepherded his colleague Rachel to a surprise rendezvous with her boyfriend in a Vermont cheese cave, a marriage proposal ensued. And, according to Wolfe and his colleagues’ new paper in Current Biology, so did a discovery about evolution. Some cheese varieties are ripened in caves where they attract microbes—yeast, bacteria, and fungi (molds)—which form a rind on the cheese surface. Molds like Penicillium (the same genus that produces the human antibiotic, but a different species) spur the ripening...

Most modern dog breeds have small amounts of wolf ancestry from long after dogs were domesticated, according to a new study. The wolf DNA isn't left over from when dogs and wolves diverged; instead, it most likely came from interbreeding in the past few thousand years. That wolfish influence may be linked to certain characteristics, such as size and personality traits, in different dog breeds, researchers reported Nov. 24 in the journal PNAS. "Dogs are our buddies, but apparently wolves have been a big part of shaping them into the companions we know and love today," study co-author Logan Kistler,...

An award-winning Canadian-American author whose career was tied to his apparent indigenous ancestry has recently learned that he has no Cherokee roots.Thomas King revealed the findings on Monday in an opinion piece published in the Globe and Mail newspaper. The announcement follows a mid-November meeting with King and members of the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, a US-based group dedicated to exposing people who falsely claim American Indian heritage. The 82-year-old said he accepts the findings of a genealogist with the organisation but writes in the essay: "I feel as though I've been ripped in half.""Not the Indian I had in...

According to a statement released by Eötvös Loránd University, an international team of researchers led by Tamás Hajdu of Eötvös Loránd University has identified a skeleton unearthed on Budapest's Margaret Island as the remains of Duke Béla of Macsó. The thirteenth-century duke is known to have been the maternal grandson of King Béla IV of Hungary and a member of the Scandinavian Rurik dynasty, which ruled Kievan Rus, on his father's side. Austrian historical accounts attest that the duke was assassinated in November 1272, and that his body was recovered by relatives and buried in a monastery on Margaret Island....

A 55-year-old mystery about a Canadian woman who seemingly fell off the face of the Earth was partially solved earlier this month with the announcement from Metro police that human remains found in the desert more than half a century ago had finally been identified. Las Vegas mob duo tied to 55-year-old cold case murder | 5:50 8 News Now -- Las Vegas | 404K subscribers | 106,607 views | November 18, 2025

A new breakthrough shows that some of biology’s most fragile molecules can persist far deeper into the past than scientists ever imagined. By decoding ancient gene activity from Ice Age remains, researchers have opened a window into the real-time biology of long-extinct animals. Credit: Shutterstock =========================================================================== For the first time, researchers have uncovered Ice Age RNA preserved within permafrost mammoth tissue, offering a rare glimpse into real-time gene activity from tens of millennia ago. Researchers at Stockholm University have, for the first time ever, isolated and sequenced RNA molecules from woolly mammoths that lived during the Ice Age. The team...

Lentil plant grown at Fuerteventura. Credit: Fayna Brenes =============================================================== Ancient lentils preserved in volcanic silos link modern Canarian crops to 2,000-year-old North African origins. Lentils cultivated in the Canary Islands today have roots that extend nearly 2,000 years into the past. This finding comes from the first-ever genetic study of archaeological lentils, conducted by researchers at Linköping University and the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in Spain. Because these lentils have been adapted for centuries to thrive in hot and arid environments, they may offer valuable genetic traits for future crop breeding in response to ongoing climate change....

Researchers have analyzed a sample of DNA believed to belong to Adolf Hitler, which they say reveals the dictator of Nazi Germany had a genetic marker for a rare disorder that can delay puberty, according to a new documentary. The research, which took more than four years to complete, was led by geneticist Turi King, a professor at the UK’s University of Bath who is known for identifying the remains of King Richard III. King said she verified that a piece of material taken from a couch in the bunker where Hitler shot himself in 1945 was soaked in the...

We marked last week the death at age 97 of James D. Watson (1928 – 2025), co-discoverer with Francis Crick of the structure of DNA. Reflecting on his life leads to contradictory responses: a hero of science, whose work led to insights pointing to life’s intelligent design, he was also a bigoted atheist and champion of pseudoscientific racism.The names Watson and Crick are almost as iconic as the DNA double helix that they elucidated in 1953, for which they won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Maurice Wilkins. One discovery led to another: Crick’s sequence hypothesis...

Everyone knows Beethoven went deaf, but nobody really knew what killed him until now. Let’s get into it. For centuries, people talked about his genius and his misery like they were the same thing. And as it turns out, they kinda were. The man who gave the world symphonies was being poisoned every single day of his life. Scientists have tested the locks of hair that fans snipped from his head when he died in 1827. And what they found was pure mayhem. His body was loaded with lead, arsenic, and mercury. His wine, his medicine, even the glass he...

James Watson, who co-discovered the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953, has died at age 97. Born in Chicago in 1928, Watson made the groundbreaking discovery at just 24 years old alongside British physicist Francis Crick. Watson died in hospice care after a brief illness, his son confirmed Friday, according to The Associated Press. "As a scientist, his and Francis Crick’s determination of the structure of DNA, based on data from Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins and their colleagues at King’s College London, was a pivotal moment in the life sciences," Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Watson’s former research institution, said in...

According to an IFL Science report, the Jomon, a group of hunter-gatherers who lived in what is now Japan between 16,000 and 3,000 years ago, had less Denisovan ancestry than other East Asians. The Denisovans were an archaic group of humans, first identified through bones discovered in Siberia's Denisova Cave, who lived in Asia between about 200,000 and 40,000 years ago. Today, people living in Oceania and islands in Southeast Asia have generally inherited about four percent of their DNA from the Denisovans. To learn more about how Denisovan genes spread through these populations, Jiaqi Yang of the Max Planck...

These species skip the tadpole stage entirely, an incredibly rare phenomenon among toads and frogs. In A Nutshell Scientists identified three new toad species in Tanzania that give birth to live babies instead of laying eggs, bringing the global total of live-bearing frogs and toads to just 20 species. DNA extracted from museum specimens collected in 1899 helped researchers solve a 115-year-old mystery about where these toads actually live, with genetic analysis showing populations previously thought to be one species are actually four distinct species separated by mountain ranges. The newly described species face serious conservation threats, with ranges as...

As many people have pointed out, it's basically the case that we don't actually like the taste of "fish." After all, one of the worst things you can say about a food — particularly fish! — is that it smells or tastes "fishy." So you can imagine how difficult it was for this Portuguese family when their son started smelling, well, exactly like that. Via Live Science: Shortly after eating different types of fish, the child would develop an odor of rotting fish emanating from his body. The smell was noxious and powerful, especially around his head and hands. He...

Greek scientists have confirmed a rare genetic event deep in the wild—one that blurs the line between domestic and untamed. A team of Greek wildlife biologists has confirmed the country’s first genetically verified wolf-dog hybrid, identified during a multi-year study of wild wolf populations. The animal, discovered in the forests of northern Greece, carries a genetic profile of 55% domestic dog and 45% gray wolf, according to data released by the conservation group Callisto. The finding was made during an analysis of 50 biological samples collected from wolves across mainland Greece. DNA sequencing revealed one specimen with clear hybrid characteristics....

The retreat from Russia by Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Grande Armée in 1812 was a cataclysmic event that marked the beginning of the end for his empire and personal dominance in Europe, with about 300,000 soldiers perishing in a force that originally numbered roughly a half million. A new study involving DNA extracted from the teeth of 13 French soldiers who were buried in a mass grave in Lithuania's capital Vilnius along the route of the retreat is offering a deeper understanding of the misery the Grande Armée experienced, detecting two pathogens not previously documented in this event. "Vilnius...

Genetic and archaeological evidence now points to Aboriginal Australians arriving around 50,000 years ago, later than once believed. Credit: Shutterstock =================================================================== A new study by a Utah anthropologist, based on genetic evidence, concludes that the colonizers of Sahul arrived later than the commonly held estimate of 65,000 years ago. Aboriginal Australian culture is recognized as the world’s longest continuous living tradition. Earlier studies estimated that the ancestors of today’s Indigenous Australians, known as the Sahul peoples, first reached the continent about 65,000 years ago. Yet new genetic research from the University of Utah, which examines traces of Neanderthal DNA in...

Tens of thousands of years ago, Homo sapiens embarked on a major migration out of Africa and began settling around the world. But exactly how, when and where humans expanded has long been a source of debate. Now, researchers have used genomic sequencing to trace what they’re calling the “longest migration out of Africa.” Over the course of many generations and thousands of years, humans from Eurasia trekked more than 12,400 miles to eventually reach the southernmost tip of South America, according to a new paper published in the journal Science. In addition to providing insight into human expansion throughout...

It was in egg-cellent condition. Argentine paleontologists found a real diamond in the rough after happening across a perfectly preserved 70-million-year-old dinosaur egg during an excavation. “It was a complete and utter surprise,” Gonzalo Leonel Muñoz, a Vertebrate paleontologist at the Bernardo Rivadavia Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences, told National Geographic of the “spectacular” find. “‘It’s not uncommon to find dinosaur fossils, but the issue with eggs is that they are much less common.” The team of paleontologists was reportedly conducting an excavation campaign in the fossil-rich region of Río Negro, when they stumbled across the primeval embryo. While dinosaur...