Genes Reveal the Ancient Battle Between Man and Virus
	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 capability of inserting themselves into the DNA, leaving traces of their existence in our genes. Such an ancient retrovir ... [read more >>]
	22 July 2008, 10:47GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Rare Mutation Lowers Alcohol-Related Cancers
	A study conducted in the UK suggests that as much as 25 percent of the population of the country is protected against alcohol-related cancers as a result of having certain genetic mutations that allows the body to eliminate the alcohol much faster than in the case of the rest of the population. This in turn alters the carcinogenic effects of alcohol, reducing people’s chances of developing mouth, throat or oesophageal cancers to half. T ... [read more >>]
	21 July 2008, 06:52GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Tasmanian Tiger Genes Inserted in Mice DNA for Study
	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 to the University of Melbourne and the University of Texas, to be used in a study investigating the functionality of the thy ... [read more >>]
	20 May 2008, 09:41GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Skin Cancer Causing Gene Identified
	A new study conducted at DeCODE Genetics in Iceland and at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research, Australia reveals that skin pigmentation and hair color may not have such an important role in getting skin cancer after sitting in the Sun, not as much as a newly found gene that could be used to predict which person is most likely to get skin cancer. Kari Stefannson, CEO at DeCODE says that they have identified a genetic ... [read more >>]
	19 May 2008, 10:07GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

How a Genetic Man Is Actually a Woman
	We know that boys have XY sex chromosomes, while girls have XX. However, in some cases, newborn girls can be XY. A new research published in the Nature journal clarifies why some XY embryos, instead of being born as males, develop ovaries and evolve as girls: it’s because of a gene called Sox9, involved in formation of the testes, and other two control genes. "There are a surprisingly large number of cases where this pro ... [read more >>]
	09 May 2008, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Platypus Genome Sequenced: 5 Times More Sex Chromosomes than Humans
	The platypus is by far the strangest mammal, with its bird-like bill and reptile traits. Its genetics seems to be equally strange, as revealed by a new research published in the Nature journal and carried out by Prof Chris Ponting's team at the Medical Research Council Functional Genomics Unit in Oxford, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge and the Genome Sequencing Centre of ... [read more >>]
	08 May 2008, 04:24GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Abuse Causes a Suicidal Switch in Brain Gene Activity
	An abused child does not have only an impaired behavior, but also a structurally different brain. That happens because early child abuse appears to permanently change gene expression in the brain, as pointed by a postmortem investigation of suicide victims, recently published in the Nature Neuroscience journal. It is clear that we are the result of gene interaction and of the environment. External factors may determine which ... [read more >>]
	08 May 2008, 03:36GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Why Attractive Faces Are Symmetric and Gender Specific
	The face is one of the few things you cannot, under any circumstance, neglect in a new possible mate. For humans, the face is an important source of mating and social information. By casting only one glance, you can see if a face is attractive or not. Many studies have focused on issues like symmetry and the differences between a masculine and a feminine face in an attempt to predict the level of attractiveness of a face. However, the exac ... [read more >>]
	07 May 2008, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

About 50% of the Captive Tigers Are Purebred
	A new research published in Current Biology comes to confirm the role zoos, farms and private collections could have in saving menaced species: it seems that up to 50% of the captive tigers could be "purebred" members of an endangered subspecies. This finding may boost the number of animals to be involved in breeding programs, in a bleak time for the wild animals. About 3,000 tigers are still live in the wild, as compared to ... [read more >>]
	21 April 2008, 03:42GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Gene Fossils and Human-Chimp Hybridization
	Our closest living relatives are chimpanzees and bonobos. But their genomes, besides being a proof of relatedness to us, also display anomalies, as revealed by a new research published in the journal "PLos Genetics." These weird DNA areas may explain one of the most mysterious intervals in our own evolution: 5.4 million years ago when humans and chimps diverged from a common ancestor. Modern chimps and bonobos have split from the ... [read more >>]
	18 April 2008, 03:19GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

57 New "Height" Genes Have Been Found
	The difference between Danny DeVito and Dolph Lundgren is given only by genes. So far, only two of these genes have been known. But three recent researches published in the journal "Nature Genetics" have augmented our knowledge on the issue, discovering dozens of new genes involved in this. Height is a genetic trait, and what you got from your mother or father explains why you are shorter or higher than others. Fore ... [read more >>]
	09 April 2008, 02:50GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

How to Skip Sex
	Sex is considered the engine of the evolution. Without sex, we would all be similar clones. Sex brings diversity, but also it can repair the effects of negative mutations. Healthy genes from one parent can counteract the presence of a damaged (mutated) gene from the other parent, resulting healthier offspring. Thus, theoretically, asexual species should accumulate harmful mutations over time, that would doom the species. But some micro ... [read more >>]
	07 April 2008, 05:23GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

How Blue or Green Eyes Appeared
	Blue or almost black, slate-gray, golden or violet or fainted green. Our eye color depends on that of our parents or grandparents. This is one of the strictest genetically inherited traits. No matter the hues, eyes are divided in two types depending on their color: dark (brown or black) and light (blue or green). The eye color is given by the amount of melanin, the same pigment from hair and skin. The higher the melanin amount, the dar ... [read more >>]
	04 April 2008, 21:21GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Latin Americans: 50% White from the Ancestral Father, 50% Amerindian from the Ancestral Mother
	What does Latino mean? A new genetic analysis published in the online journal PLoS Genetics explains: 50% White from the father's side and 50% Amerindian or Black from the mother's side. The research investigated the ancestry across Latin America and even if a significant differentiation between regions was found, the DNA shows a "genetic continuity" between pre- and post-Columbian populations. The study a ... [read more >>]
	25 March 2008, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

First Sex Chromosome Gene Connected to Meiosis and Male Sterility
	Just having a XY sex chromosome formula won't make you a man. Nor the XX formula makes you a woman. Increasing evidence shows that human sex is not caused by sex chromosomes, but by genes placed on those chromosomes. Over 50 genes involved in sex expression have been found so far. 7 operate in the brain even before the gonads are formed. Now add a new one: a team at the University of Pennsylvania has detected a gene, TEX11, ... [read more >>]
	15 March 2008, 04:53GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Why Nipples Grow at the Front?
	During the womb development, nipple will grow on front and the spine in the back. A team at the University of Auckland has also found why, in a research published in Nature Cell Biology. The gene Runx2 was already known to control bone development, but the researchers led by Dr Maria Flores, senior research fellow of the university's school of medical sciences, have discovered it is the regulator dictating the developmen ... [read more >>]
	29 February 2008, 07:18GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Why Humans Have Lighter or Darker Skin Color?
	It is simplistic to differentiate people in races based on the skin tones. What we call Blacks can be separated in many races, equally or not related between them and other races; the term White is misleading too. In the case of the so-called Mongoloid race, skin tones vary significantly. But no matter what, skin color is one of the most visible factors that helps differentiate human look, and a new research adds to explain u ... [read more >>]
	27 February 2008, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Two New Mutations Found to Cause Baldness
	Our scalp has about 100,000 hair follicles. About 100 of them stop working daily and, consequently, hairs fall. But at the same rate they are replaced. Of course, this is the case when baldness is not encoded in your genes. Scientists are still trying to understand the pathway of baldness genetics, but two recent researches come to explain a little bit more. It appears that each type of baldness is caused by specific genes.. ... [read more >>]
	26 February 2008, 02:40GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Genes Show it: We Have All Come From Africa!
	This study is the most impressive research so far tracking our evolutionary journey. The new research published in the Nature journal confirms that modern humans emerged in Africa and then spread into Asia to reach Europe, the Pacific and Americas. The team focused on 650,000 genetic markers in about 1,000 subjects from 51 populations worldwide, the largest study of this type so far. "You get less and less variation the ... [read more >>]
	22 February 2008, 05:42GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Identical Twins Are Not 100% Genetically Identical!
	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 their DNA. The second category of twins are identical or monozygotic twins, when two embryos develop from one ... [read more >>]
	20 February 2008, 05:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

You'll Have More Kids by Marrying Your Cousin
	We know that marrying your first degree cousin is not good. Inbreeding or consanguinity (marriage between close relatives, like first degree cousins) increases the risk for negative mutations to appear in double sets and manifest in children, in a proportion of 25 % (which, in human probability, may mean that all the children can be born ill). This explains why 50 % of the Bedouins in the Sinai Peninsula are born deaf! And her ... [read more >>]
	08 February 2008, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

New 582 Genes Humans Have Evolved in the Last 60,000 Years!
	We migrated from Africa about 100,000 years ago and, since then, we have colonized the whole Earth, adapting to new environments and diets. It is clear that this accelerated an evolution in our physical traits, in the genes connected to skin color or stature, as means of adaptation to novel habitats. A new research published in the journal "Nature Genetics," by a French-Spanish team, has detected no less then 582 ge ... [read more >>]
	08 February 2008, 05:24GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Blue Eyes: A Mutation Appeared 10,000 Years Ago!
	Nature played with one of our ancestors, and it caused the blue eye color to appear; and now, women are in love with the blue eyes of Brad Pitt and men with those of Kristanna Loken. And that ancestor lived 6,000-10,000 years ago, as found by a research carried out at the University of Copenhagen. "Originally, we all had brown eyes. But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a � ... [read more >>]
	31 January 2008, 03:46GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Molecular Fossil Sex
	Humans come as boys or girls, but some organisms do not and without being hermaphrodites, they still have sex. In fact, one of the most primitive types of sexual differentiation has just been described by a team from Duke University Medical Center lead by Dr. Joseph Heitman in the journal Nature. The ancestral sex-determining genes were described in one of the oldest fungus species, Phycomyces blakesleeanus. Fungi do not possess sex c ... [read more >>]
	18 January 2008, 05:27GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Black Boobs Go Out 21 Years Earlier!
	For long, medical care has been blamed for the racial clinical difference on the disparity of breast cancer between white women and black women, first observed in the '70s in US, with the emergence of the new technique of mammography. But many subsequent researches found that African and American women with African ancestry are more likely to develop breast cancer before menopause and die of it, compared to white women. ... [read more >>]
	17 January 2008, 05:56GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Could We Live 800 Years?
	Immortality and eternal youth has always been the dream of the humankind. What about a lifespan of 800 years? Yeasts can do it, in their world, if experience a specific mutation. This is the result of a research published in PLoS Genetics by a team at the University of Southern California. They prolonged the lifespan of yeast fungus tenfold (from one week to 10 weeks) by playing with two genes and restricting caloric intake, ... [read more >>]
	17 January 2008, 05:28GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

How Will Your Child Look Like?
	Kids look like their parents or grandparents, and brothers and sisters look alike. How can you predict the traits of your future child? This is the science of heredity. Heredity operates on genes (made of DNA) placed on chromosomes, located inside a cell's nucleus. Each human has 46 chromosomes, arranged in 23 pairs, half coming from the mother and half from the father. The chromosomes of a pair are similar but not identical. Wome ... [read more >>]
	15 January 2008, 16:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Too Short? This Newfound Gene Could Be Responsible
	Being too short or too tall impacts your welfare, from social life to sex life. That's why, scientists are struggling to find out which are the genes that influence our height. In a research published in the journal "Nature Genetics" and made on over 35,000 subjects, an international team discovered that genes connected to osteoarthritis could have a minor role in determining our height. These genes are found in an area ... [read more >>]
	14 January 2008, 03:33GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Your Brain Degenerating by Itself
	It starts with slight changes of personality and behavior but they gradually begin to be more and more severe. The symptoms include mood swings, irritability, depression and violent rage seizures. The patients can experience involuntary body spasms, hands and feet instability. The coordination ability decreases and the patient turns increasingly clumsy. The speech turns inarticulate. Swallowing becomes difficult and memory and focusing cap ... [read more >>]
	19 December 2007, 07:21GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Mystery of Pinot Noir Decoded
	A good wine does not come cheap. Usually, if you go to an European country with tradition on wines, all that is under $8 dollars per liter could be discarded. Of course, the most exquisite wines can reach hundreds of dollars and in luxury restaurants this can go further. It is said that the quality of a wine is in the soil, climate and yeast, but before all the grape strain. No wonder that a new genetic research, published in the on-li ... [read more >>]
	19 December 2007, 02:46GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Why Humans Are Black or White?
	First humans might have been black, but once they started the migration out of Africa about 100,000 years ago, their skin color gradually paled, in the new colder climes. 10,000 years ago, at the end of the Ice Age, marine stickleback fish started to colonize lakes and streams in Europe, Asia and North America, and they seem to have experienced a similar color change. A new research led by Howard Hughes, Medical Institute investigator, a ... [read more >>]
	14 December 2007, 14:11GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Size Really Does Matter!
	"Oh, no, honey, it's about technique!" says your girl. Is it so? Some fish come with the pure truth: size does matter! In the case of the swordtail, a common tank fish, the simple sight of a well-endowed male turns off an entire families of genes (about 77 genes overall) in the female's brain, as a team at the University of Texas at Austin has found in a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Soci ... [read more >>]
	14 December 2007, 03:01GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Fluorescent Cats Obtained through Genetic Engineering!
	In nature, only fireflies and marine creatures (like jellyfish, abyssal squids and fish, and others) are fluorescent, but now, after researchers managed to obtain fluorescent pigs, rabbits, butterflies and tank fish, based on genes from these creatures, now we have fluorescent cats, too. This was achieved by a South Korean team by inserting in the cat genome a fluorescent protein gene, through a procedure that could help develop treat ... [read more >>]
	13 December 2007, 03:17GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Being Cheap/Generous is in Your Genes!
	Are you sharing the last penny with the others or eating only pretzels not to spend money on food? Are you offering flowers to your female workmates on the 8th of March or on their birthdays, or is this a nonsense gesture for you? It seems that these reactions are genetically wired, as showed by a team led by Dr. Ariel Knafo, of the Psychology Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in the journal "Genes, Brai ... [read more >>]
	12 December 2007, 04:43GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

How Does the Alcohol Damage the Brain?
	Alcohol abuse can provoke a much more lasting damage on the brain and on other internal organs (liver, kidney, pancreas and so on). Studies made on animals have revealed that alcohol can impede the development of new brain cells in adults. Heavy drinking during pregnancy can also impact the development of the baby's brain, provoking the fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), associated with mental retardation. But till now, how the alc ... [read more >>]
	10 December 2007, 05:16GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

How Are Homosexual Behavior, Genes and Pheromones Interconnected?
	Homosexuality is regarded as unnatural, but that's nonsense: nature abounds in examples of homosexual behavior in animals. Various biological hypotheses say that the genes conferring homosexuality in human and animal males could deliver more fertile female offspring and the genes that confer high masculinity can produce lesbian female offspring. Vice versa, genes of high femininity can render homosexual male offspring. Males c ... [read more >>]
	10 December 2007, 04:32GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Humans Are Evolving Faster than Ever Now!
	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 roughly 10,000 years ago," said Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology, at the University of ... [read more >>]
	07 December 2007, 04:48GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

No Cancer and Higher Fertility
	What's the connection between cancer and pregnancy? A protein already known to fight cancer has been found to be involved in embryos implant in the uterus, according to a research published in Nature. The p53 protein was known to act in many anticancer processes, like DNA repair and apoptosis (cell death, impeding the development of tumors). Its inactivation through mutation in the p53 gene exposes the organism to cancer. [ADMA ... [read more >>]
	29 November 2007, 02:58GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Why Are Dogs Black?
	What's the connection between black hair, body weight and stress? Just one gene encoding for proteins previously believed to be involved in the immune system. This is the conclusion of a research carried on dogs at Stanford University and published in the journal Science. Defensins appear to be rather involved in regulating pigmentation, metabolism and synthesis of glucocorticoid hormones (involved in stress). "This study cou ... [read more >>]
	28 November 2007, 06:10GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Genes Explain How Native Americans Entered America
	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 30,000 years ago. Paleontologists have found Negroid remains in South America older than 12,000 years, resembling Black race ... [read more >>]
	27 November 2007, 02:56GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

A Gene for Oral Sex!
	The penis is a gift of evolution. At least in the case of fish, in which most species have an external fecundation (like we see in most frogs and toads), and a penis would be useless. (the sole exception are sharks, rays, and species of Poeciliidae family and related groups, tiny tropical species, some very common in fish tanks, like gupy, molly, platy, swordtail). But some fish need to have complete oral sex. And they can do ... [read more >>]
	16 November 2007, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Why Are Males More Evolved Than Females?
	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 they share the same genes with the females. In a new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ... [read more >>]
	15 November 2007, 06:19GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Fungus + Scorpion Venom = Powerful Non-Contaminant Insect Killer
	We are damping in the environment tonnes of poison (read pesticides) that finally accumulate in the water, soil and air, envenoming us directly through food, drunk water and breathed air, not to mention that all the species suffer. The ecological agriculture tries to eliminate these poisons and one way to keep off pests without pesticides is by using their pathogens bacteria and fungi, which do not harm the environment. A new researc ... [read more >>]
	14 November 2007, 03:43GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

No Link Between Early Sex and Increased Criminal Behavior
	In the conservative US, the federal "abstinence only" program has pushed hard and some researches seem to obviously reach the needed cause-and-effect link, as shown by a study released in February 2007 at Ohio State University, which found that losing virginity earlier makes youngsters 20 % more prone to juvenile crime. This is challenged by a new research led by Paige Harden, a doctoral candidate in psychology at th ... [read more >>]
	12 November 2007, 05:46GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Scientists Have Found a Difference Beetween the Brain of a Straight Man and That of a Gay Man
	There is a vivid debate if homosexuality is a well-defined genetic trait, like the skin, hair and eye color, or a matter of choice. But many human traits fall along a continuum, like the height, and the common concept that everyone is strictly either "gay" or "straight", could be misleading. Studies reached the same conclusion when it comes to homosexuality, and less than 10 % of the people score as "pure" het ... [read more >>]
	10 November 2007, 05:58GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

What Are The Genes and the DNA?
	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, that's perfectly true: genes are inherited from the parents. Our bodies are made of about 100,000 billion cells. Inside the nucleus ... [read more >>]
	07 November 2007, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Sex War: 90% or 50% Females?
	There is a sex ratio of about 1:1 in most species, including humans, meaning that an approximately equal number of males and females are produced. For the first time, geneticists at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, have discovered a genetic mechanism delivering this balanced ratio, at least valid for fruit flies, as wrote in the article published in the November issue of PLoS Biology. Wild fruit flies display the 1:1 sex ... [read more >>]
	07 November 2007, 06:42GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Breastfed Children Are More Intelligent!
	A research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found a gene that improves IQ in breastfed children. Having the FADS2 gene made children score, on average, 7 points more in IQ tests if they were breastfed. The study found breastfeeding had no effect on the IQ of children with a different version. This gene, found in 90 % of the people, is known to encode enzymes involved in the metabolism of fa ... [read more >>]
	06 November 2007, 05:43GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Why Do Asians Have Thicker Hair Fibers?
	Being bald or boasting a "leonine mane", having straight or curled hair, blond or black… it's all in the genes. And while you're admiring the silky hair of the East Asian girls, you should know one fact: their hair fibers are 30% larger than those of Africans and 50% than those of the Europeans. A new research presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics has unveiled the mystery ... [read more >>]
	05 November 2007, 05:37GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Gene Therapy Against Impotence
	Urinating countless times a day is one thing, but what follows after surgery is much worse: impotence. Operation of prostate cancer is in most cases connected to damage to the cavernous nerve, which means blood vessels necessary to induce an erection are blocked. Even nerve-sparing surgeries involve a long time recovery from radical prostatectomy. 15 to 30 million Americans experience impotence, and many cases are due to nerve da ... [read more >>]
	03 November 2007, 08:41GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia