Oct 09 2009
A segment of chromosome 14 folded to reveal a fractal curve using Origami. Designed and folded by Jason Ku. Photo by Erik Demaine.
How do you get three billion pairs of As, Cs, Ts and Gs—about six feet worth of DNA—into the nucleus of a tiny cell?
Most students of biology would answer by saying [...]
Oct 02 2009
Through the millennia wave after wave of migrants – often in the form of invading armies – have descended upon the British Isles.
The first people to arrive after the Ice Age were hunter-gatherers who followed their prey north from southern Europe about 12,000 years ago. The Celts came from central Europe about 3,000 years ago. [...]
Sep 25 2009
For as long as humans have lived in complex communities, cities and civilizations, they have divided and classified their societies. Those divisions have been based on age, gender, appearance or – in many cases – occupation. In many traditional societies artisans would share the same social status; as would soldiers, priests and workers in any [...]
Jun 22 2009
Each one of us carries in our cells the vital genetic data, compliments of our parents, that code for many of our traits and attributes. Whether it’s our eye color, height or the ability to consume dairy products, the variations in our genes contribute to making us ‘one of a kind’. Unfortunately, these variations can [...]
Apr 29 2009
I spent the better part of my undergraduate career lugging around massive biology textbooks. General biology, genetics, embryology: It didn’t matter, they all weighed a ton. I pored over endless chapters of text, highlighting the important sentences, always wishing for more photos, more diagrams, more graphs. A single well-made diagram or image was easier to [...]
Mar 03 2009
The way our Personal Genome Service™ works is pretty straightforward, at least from a customer’s point of view. We send you a saliva collection kit, which is at its heart a plastic tube. You spit in the tube and send it to our laboratory, which extracts DNA from your saliva, analyzes it and deposits the [...]
Feb 12 2009
Biology has changed a lot over the past 150 years. Scientists have discovered entirely new forms of life, deciphered the molecular code of heredity and observed the machinery of life on the smallest dimensions. And through it all, one scientific theory has stood the test of time.
New discoveries in genomics, medicine, developmental biology, and countless [...]
Nov 17 2008
Because their ancestors often were slaves during the 18th and 19th centuries, and therefore usually lacked birth or death certificates, it is very difficult for African American genealogists to trace their ancestors further than a few generations. Even when they can trace their ancestry to the slavery era, it is virtually impossible to find exactly [...]
Nov 14 2008
The American Society for Human Genetics (ASHG) has released a statement outlining a set of recommendations for genetic ancestry testing.
At a press briefing on Thursday, members of the ASHG Ancestry Testing Task Force Committee discussed two main themes: the need for clear communication about the limitations of genetic ancestry testing, and the need for [...]
Oct 14 2008
As talks began Saturday at Cold Spring Harbor’s first “Personal Genomes” conference, the first half of which I blogged on here, several leading explorers of the strange new world of “structural variation” in the human genome, such as Evan Eichler and Mike Snyder, shared some of their latest findings.
You can observe the most common kind [...]
