Neither Ewan Birney nor Nick Goldman can remember exactly how they came up with the idea of storing all the world’s knowledge in DNA. They know it happened in the bar of the Gastwerk Hotel in Hamburg, and that many beers were involved. They may or may not have scrawled their ideas on a napkin….
Behind every great man, the saying goes, there’s a great woman. And behind every sperm, there may be an X chromosome gene. In humans, the Y chromosome makes men, men, or so researchers have thought: It contains genes that are responsible for sex determination, male development, and male fertility. But now a team has discovered…
As plenty of frustrated middle-aged readers will know, exercise does not always lead to a drop in waist size. But a new paper from a group of researchers at Lund University, in Sweden, offers some grounds for optimism. For even if the flab obstinately stays on, it appears that exercise alters the way in which fat cells work, presumably for the better. Specifically, it does so by altering how those cells express their genes, making it the latest discovery in a rapidly developing and exciting bit of biology known as epigenetics. But what exactly is that?
What is biological immortality? To be fair, it’s not the promise of a paradisiacal garden. Neither is it the ultimate, or final, defeat of death. Instead, biological immortality has to do with aging. An organism that is biologically immortal does not age. We primarily age (the theory goes) because the cells that comprise us age….
The stuff we’re made of may be the means by which we store information that we want kept around long after we’re gone. Scientists have developed a technique of storing information in DNA, the molecule found in living creatures including humans that contains genetic instructions. The experiment is discussed in a new study in the…
You know that dog biscuit shaped like a bone but made mostly of wheat? The fact that your dog is satisfied with it instead of going for a piece of your thigh may be one of the big reasons why its ancestors evolved from wolves to house pets. A team of Swedish researchers has compared…
Researchers have been able to trace a line between some of the earliest modern humans to settle in China and people living in the region today. The evidence comes from DNA extracted from a 40,000-year-old leg bone found in a cave near Beijing. Results show that the person it belonged to was related to the…
In a SPIEGEL interview, synthetic biology expert George Church of Harvard University explains how DNA will become the building material of the future — one that can help create virus-resistant human beings and possibly bring back lost species like the Neanderthal.
While traditionally we think of only double helix DNA, scientists from Cambridge University in England have made an interesting discovery. According to the researchers, a quadruple helix is also present in some cells and is believed to relate to cancer in some ways. According to the researchers, controlling these quadruple helix structures could provide new…
Anyone who’s generously given their DNA to genomic research under the assumption that their personal biological code would be kept confidential might be in for a surprise. The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research’s Yaniv Erlich and his colleagues were able to connect “anonymous” DNA with specific individuals using just an Internet connection and other publicly…