All Posts

Resistance to Antibiotics Found in Isolated Amazonian Tribe

When scientists first made contact with an isolated village of Yanomami hunter-gatherers in the remote mountains of the Amazon jungle of Venezuela in 2009, they marveled at the chance to study the health of people who had never been exposed to Western medicine or diets. But much to their surprise, these Yanomami’s gut bacteria have already evolved a diverse array…

Read more

How The Wolf Became The Dog

Scientists who study canine origins seem to fight about everything: where dogs arose, when this happened, and even the best way to find these answers. But there’s one thing most of them agree on: how dogs became domesticated. Still, it’s taken almost a century to get here, and the details are still emerging. So what did happen? Most experts now think dogs…

Read more

Chimps That Hunt Offer a New View on Evolution

Studies of hunters and gatherers — and of chimpanzees, which are often used as stand-ins for human ancestors — have cast bigger, faster and more powerful males in the hunter role. Now, a 10-year study of chimpanzees in Senegal shows females playing an unexpectedly big role in hunting and males, surprisingly, letting smaller and weaker hunters keep their prey. The results do…

Read more

2015 | Hannah Landecker & Aaron Panofsky – Commentaries and Reflections on "Inheritance of Acquired Epigenetic Variations"

A special section of commentaries and reflections on epigenetic inheritance has been published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, centered on the reprint of the 1989 article  “Inheritance of Acquired Epigenetic Variations” by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb.  ISG faculty members Aaron Panofsky and Hannah Landecker both contributed invited commentaries to the issue, which is now available in advance online…

Read more

Why Iceland Is the World’s Greatest Genetic Laboratory

Today, the journal Nature Genetics released a set of four papers based entirely on the genetic sequences of Icelanders. Their results, which range from the identification of a new Alzheimer’s-associated gene to the age of the most recent male ancestor shared by all humans, are part of a long history of genetic discoveries from deCODE, a company that has been…

Read more

© The UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics. All Rights Reserved.