Excerpt: Colman Chadam, an 11-year-old California boy, has been ordered to transfer from his current school to another one miles away because of his genetic makeup. Now, his parents are taking the issue to court. Colman carries the genetic mutations for cystic fibrosis, a noncontagious but incurable and life-threatening disease. Despite the gene’s presence, the Jordan Middle School student in Palo…
The new research from York University, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests that the reason worker bees are such a highly skilled and specialized workforce is that the genes controlling their behavior are re-shuffled frequently, helping evolution build a better bee. redOrbit has the full story
Our national “obesity epidemic” is spawning disease, shortening life spans and bankrupting our health care system. Or is it? Could our negative attitudes about fatness-a disease that people bring upon themselves through sloth and gluttony-be more hazardous to our mental and physical well being than excess weight? Huffington Post covers the full story
This article addresses the controversy surrounding an 107-page paper by Oded Galor of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and Quamrul Ashraf of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts that is scheduled to appear soon in American Economic Review. The paper argues that there are strong links between estimates of genetic diversity for 145 countries and per-capita incomes, even after accounting…
Until now, analysis of the environment has been the domain of social scientists, who have elaborated the correlations between environment and health or behaviour — for example, that a deprived upbringing increases the risk of deviant behaviours in adulthood. Now, biologists are starting to render visible how one aspect of the environment — stress — leaves marks on the body…
A new company called Art.sy has built an art reference system called the Art Genome Project that allows web-users to discover new art based on their rated preferences. It is for art what companies like Pandora and Spotify are for music. NYTimes has the story