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Cigarette smoking is overwhelmingly the main cause of lung cancer, yet only a minority of smokers develop the disease. A study led by scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and published online on April 11, 2022, in Nature Genetics suggests that some smokers may have robust mechanisms that protect them from lung cancer by limiting mutations. The findings could help identify those smokers who face an increased risk for the disease and therefore warrant especially close monitoring. “This may prove to be an important step toward the prevention and early detection of lung cancer risk and away from the...

Bacho Kiro Cave. (Nikolay Doychinov/AFP via Getty Images) Last year, a genetic analysis of bone fragments representing our earliest known presence in Europe raised a few questions over the steps modern humans took to conquer every corner of the modern world. Whoever the remains belonged to, their family background was more entwined with the East Asian populations of their day than with today's Europeans, hinting at a far more convoluted migration for our species than previously thought. Now, researchers from the Universities of Padova and Bologna in Italy have proposed what they think might be the simplest explanation for the...

Evidence of early use of pigments by humans has been found at the Xiamabei relics site in north China's Hebei Province.Xiamabei is a Late Paleolithic site located in Yangyuan County's Nihewan Basin, which is one of the best-preserved areas in East Asia in terms of paleolithic remains and cultural sequences."The earliest known evidence of ochre-processing of prehistoric humans in China and even in East Asia was recently discovered in Xiamabei, depicting a vibrant living scene of East Asian dwellers 40,000 years ago," said Wang Fagang, associate researcher from the Hebei provincial institute of cultural relics and archaeology.The remnants of ochre,...

The Avars, mysterious horse-riding warriors who helped hasten the end of the Roman Empire, dominated the plains between Vienna and Belgrade, Serbia, for more than 2 centuries. Then, they vanished without a trace...The Avars had no written records. Grave goods and historical accounts suggest they dominated the plains of modern-day Hungary soon after their arrival in Europe about 1500 years ago. They interred their elites in massive burial mounds, surrounded by weapons, and finely decorated gold and silver vessels. They were often buried with horses and riding equipment. (The earliest stirrups in Europe are from Avar graves.)...The first Avar burials...

When the Human Genome Project was declared completed in 2003, it had mapped 92% of genes, with the rest remaining a mystery for nearly two decades due to technological limitations. Now, scientists have finished sequencing the other 8%, and the human genome has finally been fully sequenced. Almost 100 scientists from the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) Consortium collaborated on the project to map the entire human genome. The additional 8% that was sequenced accounts for 400 million new letters added to the existing sequenced DNA -- enough for an entire chromosome, as CNN reported. The additional genes are very important for adaptation,...

The database used by the New York Police Department violates state law and the Constitution, the Legal Aid Society contends in a lawsuit. Three years ago, Shakira Leslie was returning home from a cousin’s birthday party in the Bronx when officers pulled over her friend’s car for a traffic infraction. After she got out of the back seat, the police searched her and found nothing illegal. But when a gun was found in another passenger’s bag, everyone in the car was arrested, charged with weapon possession and taken to a precinct. There, Ms. Leslie waited for more than 12 hours...

A new paper explores how gene-editing technology could be used to bring a species back, but even its authors have concerns about what that could mean. If Tom Gilbert could bring any extinct animal back to life, he said, it wouldn't be dinosaurs or woolly mammoths or any other megafauna that once roamed the planet. His is a humbler choice: the Christmas Island rat, a species that was wiped out from its island home in the Indian Ocean more than a century ago. Gilbert, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, admitted that his pick may not be...

Ocean survey could bring to light many unknown speciesThe creature, as viewed from the submarine moving about the ocean depths between Iceland and the Azores, was like nothing the marine biologists had seen before. It had a purple, lotus flower-shaped head perched atop a sinuous green stalk of a body measuring several centimetres long. Months later, the scientists are still not entirely sure if the animal was a fish. "It was a type of animal that didn't match the characteristics of any we know of," said Michael Vecchione, a deep-sea expert and part of the expedition. Yesterday's preliminary report on...

A 4-year-old girl who went missing in New Mexico nearly 62 years ago has been identified as "Little Miss Nobody," a previously unidentified girl whose remains were discovered in Arizona, police announced Tuesday. Authorities identified the victim as Sharon Lee Gallegos, who was abducted on July 21, 1960. Police said Gallegos was abducted by a man and a woman while she was playing with other children in an alley behind her grandmother's house in Alamogordo, New Mexico. According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, the couple had been stalking the girl for several days. Gallegos was dragged into...

Body identified as Sharon Lee Gallegos of New Mexico YAVAPAI COUNTY, AZ — Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office has released the identity of “Little Miss Nobody,” a young girl who remained nameless for more than six decades after her killing. The formerly nameless homicide victim whose body was found 62 years ago, was identified as Sharon Lee Gallegos of New Mexico, officials said Tuesday morning at a press conference in Prescott. Gallegos had reportedly been abducted from the alley behind her home in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 21, 1960, when she was 4 years old.

PRESCOTT, ARIZONA – (March 11, 2022) – Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office and partners including the National Center for Exploited and Missing Children (NCMEC); the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUS); Othram, the laboratory that conducted the DNA analysis; and a long list of others over the years, have finally identified the little girl whose remains were found in the desert in Yavapai County in 1960. The unidentified little girl who won the hearts of Yavapai County in 1960 and who occupied the minds and time of YCSO and partners for 62 years, will now rightfully be given her name...

A girl dubbed “Little Miss Nobody” has been identified some 62 years after her burned body was discovered buried in a remote Arizona desert, authorities said. The Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office will identify the girl Tuesday during a press conference at a community college in Prescott. “The unidentified little girl who won the hearts of Yavapai County in 1960 and who occupied the minds and time of YCSO and partner for 62 years will now rightfully be given her name back and will no longer need to be referred to as Little Miss Nobody,” sheriff officials said in a statement....

We’re all human: Scientists create world’s biggest family tree linking 27 million people OXFORD, United Kingdom — The world’s biggest family tree linking around 27 million people has been created by scientists. The genetic model combines thousands of modern and prehistoric genomes, providing new insight into key events in human history. The breakthrough is a major step towards mapping the entirety of human relationships, with a single lineage that traces the ancestry of all people on Earth. The family tree also has widespread implications for medical research, identifying genetic predictors of disease. “We have basically built a huge family tree,...

A large study of more than 36,000 high-quality MRI brain scans has found that drinking four units of alcohol a day – two beers, or two glasses of wine – causes structural damage and brain volume loss equivalent to 10 years of aging. The science on alcohol consumption can be confusing and overwhelming. A quick scroll through our coverage over the years will tell you it directly causes cancer, but also reduces inflammation and helps to flush toxins out of the brain. It stunts growth in developing brains by nearly 50 percent, it permanently damages your DNA and is confidently...

It sounds simple, but to treat someone you suspect has COVID, you need to confirm they are actually infected with the coronavirus. In the UK, it is easy to take this for granted – we've had a reliable detection method for diagnosing infected patients widely available since early on in the pandemic. This allowed for people to be treated and cared for promptly, saving lives. The main technique for identifying whether someone has COVID is called reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction testing – or RT-PCR. This process can tell whether the coronavirus's genetic material is present in a sample taken...

Nearly 90 years after the last thylacine died, a group of scientists at the University of Melbourne, Australia, are attempting to bring the extinct marsupial back to life Thylacines, also known as Tasmanian tigers (despite being a marsupial and looking nothing like a tiger apart from their stripy back), are thought to have gone extinct back in 1936, when Benjamin – the last confirmed member of the species – died in captivity at Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo. Reports of thylacine sightings in the wild continued long after Benjamin died, with many people hopeful that they might still be alive out there...

The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, is one of Australia's most iconic species. Even though it has been extinct since 1936, the slender, striped marsupial maintains its place in Australian mythology because of a constant string of supposed sightings that has captivated the public and the media. Just last year, one group claimed to have spotted the "Tassie tiger" padding through Australia's forests. The claims were never verified. Sadly, the Tasmanian tiger is gone -- but with advances in biotechnology, that might not have to be the case. A group of researchers from the University of Melbourne plan to bring the...

Scientists discovered an absolutely massive bacterium that can be seen without the aid of a microscope and lurks among the mangroves of Grande-Terre in the Caribbean... The single-celled organism can grow up to 0.78 inches (2 centimeters) long and resembles a thin string, according to a report describing the discovery, posted Feb. 18 to the preprint database bioRxiv. The bacterium carries all its DNA inside a membranous pouch, unlike most bacteria, whose genetic material floats, unbound, within their cells. This feature not only sets the newfound microbe apart from other bacteria, but also distinguishes it from other prokaryotes — a...

Edward Morgan, 60, is charged with capital murder after DNA testing confirmed he matched the swab taken in the 1984 autopsy.After 38 years, an arrest has been made in the murder of a 21-year-old Cheektowaga woman. Mary Jane Thompson graduated from Cleveland Hill High School and moved to Dallas, TX to pursue her dreams. "She wanted to be a model," said Mary Jane's sister Donna Book. On February 13, 1984, her family said Mary Jane was going to a clinic for medical treatment in Dallas. "When she got there they were closed and then she had taken the bus back...

In Ivory Coast a group of conservationists and veterinarians are moving this increasingly endangered forest elephant to an area where the animal is less likely to be targeted by poachers. Scientists have been using DNA testing to track how ivory traffickers are operating. As few as three major criminal groups are responsible for smuggling the vast majority of elephant ivory tusks out of Africa, according to a new study. They’ve develop a combined genetic and statistical method to determine the origin of poached ivory and they are collaborating with the Interpol Working Group on Wildlife Crime to investigate the origins...