A large study of human genetic variation finds more than 7 million spots where one person’s DNA can differ from another’s. Analyses of such variants, compiled from cataloging the genes from more than 60,000 people, are already offering doctors helpful insights into diseases such as schizophrenia and some heart conditions. Researchers from the Exome Aggregation […]

COLUMBIA, Mo. — If you find a daddy longlegs in your house, don’t be scared. “Daddy longlegs are actually pretty docile animals when it comes to interacting with humans,” says evolutionary biologist Kasey Fowler-Finn, who studies the arachnids at St. Louis University. Specifically, she studies daddy longlegs sex. She is using this common group of […]

Bonobos — chimpanzees’ sister species — don’t get the credit they deserve as tool users. Bonobos in a sanctuary’s protected forests in the Democratic Republic of Congo crack nuts with stones nearly as well as wild chimps in other parts of Africa do, researchers report online August 26 in the American Journal of Primatology. Wild […]

Genetic surgery is far away for humans — Optimism concerning application of genetic experiments to improve mankind is unwarranted now, a Canadian pediatrician told the Third International Congress of Human Genetics meeting in Chicago…. Although striking and sometimes controversial experiments in genetic surgery have in fact been performed in multicellular systems, he explained, public demand […]

Cosmic mismatchResearchers used supernovas, cosmic microwave background radiation and patterns of galaxy clusters to measure the Hubble constant — the rate at which the universe expands — but their results were mismatched, Emily Conover reported in “Debate persists on cosmic expansion” (SN: 8/6/16, p. 10). Reader J.R. Kennedy thought that light-dimming space dust and debris might explain the discrepancy. […]

Humankind’s bombs, plastics, chickens and more have altered the planet enough to usher in a new chapter in Earth’s geologic history. That’s the majority opinion of a group of 35 experts tasked with evaluating whether the current human-dominated time span, unofficially dubbed the Anthropocene, deserves a formal place in Earth’s geologic timeline alongside the Eocene […]

ORLANDO, Fla. — When sex chromosomes among common pill bugs go bad from disuse, borrowed bacterial DNA comes to the rescue. Certain pill bugs grow up female because of sex chromosomes cobbled together with genes that jumped from the bacteria. Genetic analysis traces this female-maker DNA to Wolbachia bacteria, Richard Cordaux, based at the University […]

The world’s most minuscule machines operate on the molecular level and have won their creators the 2016 Nobel Prize in chemistry. The prize is shared between Jean-Pierre Sauvage of the University of Strasbourg in France, J. Fraser Stoddart of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and Bernard Feringa of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. […]

Scaling up from one cell to many may have been a small step rather than a giant leap for early life on Earth. A single-celled organism closely related to animals controls its life cycle using a molecular toolkit much like the one animals use to give their cells different roles, scientists report October 13 in […]

To the bafflement of birders, yellow-shafted flickers (Colaptes auratus auratus) sometimes sport red or orange wing feathers. Scientists have suggested that the birds, which inhabit eastern North America, might be products of genetic variation affecting the carotenoid pigments that produce their flight-feather colors. Alternatively, the birds might be hybrids from mixing with a subspecies that […]