Home

On:

Everywhere we go, we leave little traces of ourselves behind. The strand of hair, the wad of gum, the cigarette butt, nail clipping, or puddle of spittle. And all of these negligible bits and pieces that we so casually or unknowingly discard, contain our genetic information.

Doctoral student Heather Dewey-Hagborg, who is completing her degree in electronic art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, wanted to find out just how much of ourselves we are potentially revealing through this personal debris. So she began collecting these nasty little leave-behinds, and found that, “the more I walked around the city, the more I saw these genetic artifacts everywhere I looked.”
read more

On:

You can choose your friends but not your family, so the old saying goes. But do we really choose them, or are we genetically pre-disposed to connect with the people in our friendship groups?

People who like to consider their close friends as family may not be too far wrong, according to a new study from the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University. The research project discovered that friends who do not appear to be biologically related often still resemble each other genetically.
read more

On:

When most people think of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, pictures of pest-hardy soya beans spring to mind, yet the true implications of this term are not widely considered.

Though the consumption of GMOs is a subject for debate in itself, there are other, less obvious areas in which other forms of genetic engineering could have – and are having –  dramatic effects on our daily lives. In truth, under the umbrella of the term "genetic engineering," scientists have been given almost free rein to pursue a host of wild and weird endeavors that have resulted in some extremely questionable results.

read more

On:

According to the Bible, the first human man ever to walk the Earth was Adam, created by God and partnered by his female counterpart Eve. Norse mythology shares a similar concept of a deity-created man and woman, though in Norse legend the planet’s first couple are entitled Ask and Embla.

Regardless of his given name, the world’s first man has recently been the focus of two scientific studies looking at an area of genetics known as phlyogenetics, a field of research examining the evolutionary roots of all species. The studies have been attempting to discover the essence of "Adam," sifting through a host of chromosomes to find the one from which all others were derived.
read more