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More: next 50 >>
Nanotags coating the cartridges used by a vast range of firearms could be made out of a combination of pollen and grit, to make the identification of the person firing the weapon much more accurate, say UK researchers. This way the tag would not only be invisible, but it would also have a unique signature and could b... |
2 August 2008
04:57 GMT |
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Viruses have always been part of our evolutionary process, constantly mutating in order to defeat the immune system, at the same time triggering changes in the structure of the DNA, which eventually gave us defense mechanisms that still work today. Some types of viruses, known as retroviruses, even have the capabilit... |
22 July 2008
10:47 GMT |
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The same genetic variation that offered African people better protection against malaria seems to be responsible for an increase of nearly 40 percent in the chances of contracting the HIV virus, while in infected individuals the respective genes appear to increase their lifespan by almost two years, according to a st... |
17 July 2008
09:38 GMT |
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How can one bond two DNA strands without breaking them? Well, by using a micro-sized DNA sewing machine of course! An article published in the Royal Society of Chemistry Journal Lab on a Chip has recently detailed an invention created by Japanese scientists which allows researchers to bond and manipulate individual D... |
14 July 2008
05:28 GMT |
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According to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology the increase in the number of men suffering from infertility could be directly linked to the increasing number of men suffering from diabetes. Apparently, the DNA damage in sperm cells of men with diabetes is harder to repair by specialized genes,... |
9 July 2008
08:29 GMT |
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For some reason or another, all of us like to believe that Earth is special - after all, our planet is the only one able to sustain life that we know of. Indeed, Earth is special in its own way, but life would not have been possible without the significant contribution of material coming form space. In fact, a new st... |
14 June 2008
04:46 GMT |
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Lancaster cosmetics has developed an innovative formula for anti-aging skincare and cell rejuvenation, based on the concept that the secret for a long-lasting youthful complexion lies in our skin's DNA. As a result, they developed a revolutionary serum aptly called "365 Cellular Elixir" which helps provide a uni... |
5 June 2008
11:32 GMT |
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In animals the genetic material is inherited from the parents after conception. No other later action, except for rare parasitic infections that can modify your genetic material by inserting some of their DNA strands, can alter your DNA. But in bdelloid rotifers, a microscopic freshwater animal, such events happen al... |
30 May 2008
09:30 GMT |
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This is the second time Egypt conducts DNA tests in order to identify the mummy of an important pharaoh. Last year, the Egyptian authorities carried out a test involving the mummy of a female believed to be Queen Hatshepsut, but the results have never been disclosed. This time the 3,500 year old mummy of what experts... |
30 May 2008
04:18 GMT |
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The last Tasmanian tiger, thylacine, died in captivity in 1936 at Hobart Zoo after being hunted to extinction during the early 1900s. Fortunately, some thylacine pouch young and adult tissues were preserved in alcohol by museums around the world. One of those is Museum Victoria in Melbourne which donated some samples... |
20 May 2008
09:41 GMT |
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Are you eager to know the sex of your unborn child? Normally, you have to wait 4-5 months until ultrasound scanning can tell you that but, now, it is possible that you wait a shorter period of time. Many women are not even aware they're pregnant at the date when this new method can already tell them if it's... |
14 May 2008
10:52 GMT |
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The Druze people are a religious community from the Middle East. Initially, it started as an offshoot of the Ismaili sect of Islam, but also incorporated Gnostic, neo-Platonic and other philosophies, a fact that made Islamic scholars regard it as a non-Muslim sect. A new research, published in the journal PLoS ONE, s... |
12 May 2008
05:10 GMT |
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This is like the blue whale of the bacterial world. Epulopiscium is as big as a mountain when compared to other bacteria, having the size of a grain of salt and being a million times larger than the common E. coli bacteria: you can see it with the naked eye. A new study carried out at Cornell and published in the Pro... |
9 May 2008
03:35 GMT |
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DNA is the irrefutable proof in many outstanding criminal cases. However, about 250,000 DNA samples aimed to detect a rapist can remain anywhere from 3 to 12 months in forensic laboratories backlogs, and this gives suspects more than enough time to make themselves disappear. The issue could be solved by Jessica Voorh... |
8 May 2008
14:06 GMT |
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Over 6.6 billion people inhabit the planet today. With all that, 70,000 years ago, no more than 2,000 people existed, as revealed by a new research carried out at Stanford University and published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. 70,000 years ago, our species was represented only by a small isolated African... |
29 April 2008
04:42 GMT |
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Criminals have no chance. A new human identification test relying on antibodies seems to be faster and cheaper than DNA testing, besides requiring minimal training in the field, improving the arsenal of detectives, forensic experts and the military. Our antibody signature is as unique as our DNA, and antibodies, prot... |
29 April 2008
04:13 GMT |
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In a world of intense migration and immigration, who can tell where his/her roots are? In fact, countries like US, Canada and Australia are mainly made of more or less recent immigrants. This is more than a question of identity. Various human populations display different genetic predispositions to diseases. Our phys... |
15 April 2008
04:35 GMT |
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The tuatara is by far the oldest reptile inhabiting the planet, a living fossil that survived isolated in the New Zealand, protected from competition and predation of other animal groups. Surprisingly, a DNA analysis published in the journal "Trends in Genetics," carried out by a team led by evolutionary biologist a... |
21 March 2008
05:00 GMT |
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The idea that HIV infiltrated slow and steady in London is infirmed by a new research. The study published in "PLoS Medicine" shows that the rapid growth of the HIV/AIDS epidemic during the late 1990s, in the gay community of London, was episodic, with multiple clusters of transmission in a few years, explaining the ... |
18 March 2008
14:06 GMT |
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Our closest evolutionary relative was the Neanderthal man (Homo neanderthalensis). But when did we share a common ancestor? A new research published in the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" shows that gradual changes in human skull size and shape would indicate that, 300,000 to 400,000 years a... |
18 March 2008
03:47 GMT |
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Of course, it was not Gitche Manitou their creator. All the Red Skins, from those of North America to those of South America, came from Asia. A new DNA study published in the journal "PLoS One" shows that 6 women founded about 95% of the populations of the modern Native Americans, 20,000 years ago."The finding does n... |
14 March 2008
03:48 GMT |
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Europe may be called the Old Continent, but its current population has a rather recent origin. And a new research published in the journal "Nature" shows that white European people are less genetically diverse, carrying more harmful mutations, than the black Africans. The results point that a population "bottleneck" ... |
21 February 2008
03:48 GMT |
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IBM scientists are currently researcher on linking DNA molecules with conductive carbon nanotubes. The procedure is extremely complicated because of the small scale the engineers are forced to work at. Once the carbon nanotubes are interconnected, the DNA can be shed off, leaving just an orderly grid of nanotubes. Th... |
20 February 2008
08:41 GMT |
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We know that twins are of two types. Some twins come from two different eggs fecundated by two different sperms (this means they can have different genders); they are just ordinary brothers born at the same moment. This are called dizygotic or non-indentical twins and, like any brothers, they share usually 40-60 % of... |
20 February 2008
05:06 GMT |
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The oldest known bird, Archaeopteryx, lived 150 million years ago, but this species and its relatives can be hardly differentiated from dinosaurs. And for about 90 million years on, fossil birds had been toothed, being very different from the modern types. Fossils resembling modern birds started to appear around the ... |
6 February 2008
03:25 GMT |
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Common knowledge says that a child has two parents. But what about three biological parents? A team at the Newcastle University has created human embryos containing DNA from two women and a man, a technology that one day could be a therapy for couples, for getting kids free of genetic diseases. Still, these embryos a... |
6 February 2008
02:47 GMT |
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Telepathy sounds like something out of the freak show, or SF stories. But, this trait has been found to be displayed by the DNA molecules. DNA double helixes can recognize fitting sequences from a distance and then join together, without the implication of enzymes or other molecules. Researchers had not suspected tha... |
28 January 2008
03:32 GMT |
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Last November saw the launch of the 999 bucks DNA service in the U.S. from a firm that has Google as a founding father. It was an instant success and requests for it started pouring in from all across the world. After polling them together, the managing wing of the 23andMe company decided that Europe and Canada were ... |
22 January 2008
09:36 GMT |
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What's behind the racial mix we call Polynesians and Micronesians (and think about from Hawaiians to Maori)? A new research carried out by a team led by Jonathan Friedlaender points that the race of the Pacific islanders could be the result of East Asians who quickly island-hopped through Melanesia (New Guinea,... |
21 January 2008
03:48 GMT |
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A cloned Scarlet Johanson may be the dream of any man and a Californian company has just made the first step toward this purpose: for the first time, scientists have achieved cloned human embryos using DNA extracted from adult skin cells, as reported in the Stem Cells journal. "That's an important first step tow... |
18 January 2008
04:14 GMT |
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We all know that how we look, behave and function is a question of genes. And genes are made of DNA. But now, a team at Princeton's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, in a research to be published in the journal "Nature", challenges this.They have found an "epigenetic" pathway bypassing DNA, in a ty... |
7 January 2008
04:37 GMT |
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There's nothing taller on Earth: large giraffe bulls can be 6 m (20 ft) tall, and weigh up to 1.5 tonnes! If you look at giraffes across the African savannas, you'll see that they all look the same. With one exception: the shape and color of their spots. A new DNA research published in "BMC Biology" shows t... |
28 December 2007
05:10 GMT |
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There are more described beetle species than all the other described animal species. And it is believed that there are even more undescribed species, by the order of millions, to be included into the beetles' Coleoptera Order, with 17 "superfamilies" and 168 families. Many will disappear before description, as w... |
27 December 2007
05:46 GMT |
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The human body functions based on the activity of about 35,000 genes, comprised in 3 billion DNA bases. And even the bacteria needs hundreds of genes to cope with their metabolic functions. But there must be an extreme of functioning genes into an organism at which life is possible. German researchers discovered in 2... |
13 December 2007
06:00 GMT |
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If you think that human evolution has stopped, you're extremely wrong: in fact, it has just sped up! And people on various continents are just turning more different. "Humans are evolving rapidly, and that the pace of change has accelerated a lot in the last 40,000 years, especially since the end of the Ice Age ... |
7 December 2007
04:48 GMT |
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Those little naughty sperms seem to have an increased vulnerability to mutation. The team at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute focused on four unstable areas in the DNA where rearrangements cause genetic diseases called genomic disorders, and discovered that some of these mutations were more frequent in sperm than ... |
4 December 2007
07:10 GMT |
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Man, this wasn't the most handsome American president... This year a research was made on laser scans of a bronze and a plaster copy of two masks of Lincoln's face, belonging to the Chicago History Museum.This revealed a high degree of facial asymmetry: Lincoln's face was much smaller than the right on... |
27 November 2007
06:34 GMT |
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There is a vivid debate if Native Americans from both South America and North America entered the continent in a single wave 12,000 years ago coming from Siberia through the Bering Strait land bridge or whether ancient Americans also came from other Asian areas or Polynesia, coming by sea as well as by land, starting... |
27 November 2007
02:56 GMT |
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Males change faster than females. Just look at a peacock's tail feathers compared to the plain peahen. In most species, males are brighter and better singers, competing for getting as much as possible mates. This way they experience sexual selection. This overdrive compared to females puzzle the scientists, as t... |
15 November 2007
06:19 GMT |
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From the color of your hair, eyes, and skin, face shape to all your skills and the way you laugh - everything's a combination of genetics, and how the activity of your genes was shaped by the environment. You may have told your lover she has her father's big blue eyes and her mother's soft skin. Well, ... |
7 November 2007
14:06 GMT |
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These are the New World's native wild boars: the peccaries. And till now, the largest pig-like species have stood hidden from scientists in the southeastern Amazon region of Brazil. It is the largest peccary in the world, about the size of a large dog.The new species, the forest giant peccary (Pecari maximus) wa... |
5 November 2007
03:56 GMT |
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At the beginning of the '80s, US received a sudden shock with the discovery of HIV. The killer was there, later it was found it originated in Africa, but how did it enter the US? Now we finally know: through Haiti, brought by just one person around 1969, much earlier than previously thought! That was the HIV-1 t... |
30 October 2007
04:28 GMT |
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I'm sure you're quite well informed on many aspects related to HIV, syphilis or gonorrhea, but the STD you're more likely to experience is Chlamydia, the "Silent Epidemic" (called so because in women it may not induce any symptoms and will linger for months or years before being diagnosed). In men, Chl... |
25 October 2007
14:06 GMT |
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It's a well-known fact that consumers who are looking to distribute pirated content on the web are usually attracted by BitTorrent because it offers high download and upload speeds and reliable connections. Because of that, the amount of the pirated content distributed through BitTorrent grew up a lot so the par... |
10 October 2007
04:34 GMT |
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When kouprey (Bos sauveli) was first found in 1937, nobody could believe it: an almost one tonne heavy beast undiscovered by science until the middle of the 20th century! Wrapped in mystery, this extremely rare ox with curving horns has been an icon of Southeast Asian conservation. But the debate was focused on wheth... |
8 October 2007
04:23 GMT |
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Neanderthals' ancestors evolved in Europe 350,000 years ago and by 130,000 years ago, genuine Neanderthals were already present. Almost 28,000 years ago they were gone, wiped out by modern men or by intermingling with them. Neanderthal remains have been found from Spain to Middle East (Israel) and Central Asia (... |
1 October 2007
04:15 GMT |
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In the end, extinct species could be revived not only with DNA coming from the body's tissue but also from hair! Hair has been found to be a better source of ancient DNA than bone or muscle in a research made on woolly mammoths. "The main problem with things like bone is that it contains real DNA from the source... |
28 September 2007
02:59 GMT |
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The 6 billion humans inhabiting the Earth are here by sheer casualty. 74,000 years ago, the human species was at the brink of extinction, with a mere census of 2,000 individuals who finally managed to overcome the crisis and transmit their genetic pool to the modern man. The crisis coincided with the first migrations... |
27 September 2007
15:31 GMT |
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There are freaks paying big sums of money for silicon injections that allegedly help them develop huge genitalia. Some got it naturally, cost-free and really unwittingly. It's about elephant people, patients with elephantiasis, a parasite disease induced by worms called filariasis, that block the lymphatic vesse... |
24 September 2007
06:07 GMT |
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It strongly affects a woman's feminity, while attempting on her life. And the earlier the diagnosis, the better the chances of survival. But a new "breakthrough" method in the detection of breast cancer developed by a team at the Institute of Human Genetics at Newcastle University could significantly cut the cos... |
22 September 2007
04:29 GMT |
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