Category: Genetics

New research led by scientists from the University of Pennsylvania, Karolinska Institute and Linköping University provides a landscape view of the human sense of touch.

A pair of male lions that roamed Kenya more than a century ago gained notoriety as the “man-eaters of Tsavo.” To be sure, the big cats hunted and ate people building a local railway. But a novel DNA analysis of hairs stuck in the…

An unexpected discovery about what made a tiny worm refuse to grow up has now led to the 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. 

Victor Ambros, now at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in Worcester, and Gary…

When Amos Abolaji returned to Nigeria from a year abroad, he brought home a strange souvenir — two jars full of fruit flies.

The biochemist had been conducting postdoctoral research at the Federal University of Santa Maria in…

It’s a bird! It’s a crab! No, it’s a fish that can taste with its legs.

Some sea robins, a group of fishes with two winglike fins and six crablike legs, use their legs to dig in sand and find buried prey with a sense much like…

Scientists have found DNA in the nucleus of brain cells, where it shouldn’t be. Bits of genes that typically reside in mitochondria insert themselves at unexpectedly high rates into brain cells’ nuclear genomes.

What’s more,…

Slimy heralds of hope are hopping around Yosemite National Park.

Being a frog hasn’t been easy in the High Sierra or in many other places ever since a fungal parasite began exterminating frogs in the United States, Australia and…

Beef jerky and some woolly mammoths have at least one thing in common: Drying turns their DNA into super-tough glass.

This glassy DNA is so stable that it preserved the three-dimensional structure of chromosomes in one woolly mammoth…

Four thousand years ago, on an island off the coast of what is now Siberia, the world’s last woolly mammoth took its final breath.

Living on that island, isolated from other mammoths, could have led to fatal levels of inbreeding…