A team of scientists from around the world led by Baylor College of Medicine and Washington University in St. Louis has completed the genome sequence of the common marmoset – the first sequence of a New World Monkey – providing new information about the marmoset’s unique rapid reproductive system, physiology and growth, shedding new light on primate biology and evolution.…
If you consider your friends family, you may be on to something. A study from the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University finds that friends who are not biologically related still resemble each other genetically. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study is coauthored by James Fowler, professor of medical genetics and political…
In 2011, experiments that allowed the potentially deadly H5N1 flu virus to spread between mammals ignited intense discussions about whether such research should be done at all, much less published. But most of the debate occurred after the research had been carried out. Kenneth Oye, a social scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, thinks that the discussion…
A variation in the CHD8 gene has a strong likelihood of leading to a type of autism accompanied by digestive problems, a larger head and wide-set eyes. “We finally got a clear-cut case of an autism-specific gene,” said Raphael Bernier, University of Washington associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and clinical director of the Autism Center at Seattle Children’s.…
There was a time when parents of newborns were perfectly content to know only a few basic things about their babies: their height, their weight, their apgar score, and which side of the family should get the credit for making the kid so adorable. But a graduate student at the University of California, Davis named Razib Khan wanted to know…
What do you get when you mix theorists in computer science with evolutionary biologists? You get an algorithm to explain sex. It turns out that 155 years after Charles Darwin first published “On the Origin of Species,” vexing questions remain about key aspects of evolution, such as how sexual recombination and natural selection produced the teeming diversity of life that…