Recently in ISG

On Wednesday, November 28, 2018, the Biotechnology and Society Freshman Cluster course hosted Dr. Josiah Zayner as part of its DIY Biology Lecture series (co-hosted by the Institute for Society and Genetics and the UCLA Cluster Program). Dr. Zayner shared his insights on biohacking, human genome editing, and public participation in science…

Image by Yathin S Krishnappa Written by Dina Fine Maron for National Geographic. [Excerpt] “Their goal is to uncover more information about how these animals move, eat, and what their genomes look like. Long hopes to detail how elephants without the benefit of tusks as tools may alter…

Written by Mary Emily O’Hara for intomore.com [Excerpt]: “In plain English, the federal government is proposing reclassifying transgender people’s legal sex back to the sex assigned at birth. And if that sex at birth was listed wrong or left unclear, the government wants to put people through genetic testing to ensure a…

Illustration: Angelica Alzona Written by Hudson Hongo for io9.com [Excerpt]: “Venom—Sony’s recently released tale of the world’s worst journalist and his head-chomping pet alien parasite—poses a number of interesting questions, such as “Is this movie bad or perfect dumb fun?” “Where do the heads go when Venom eats…

“UCLA International Institute, August 9, 2018 — The Global Health Program of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) holds an annual poster competition open to undergraduate and graduate students of its member universities. Posters can be on any global health topic, but must represent original research. Winning entries are presented at the annual APRU Global Health…

Image credit, Esther Aarts Excerpt from article: …”And look at climate change: In 2014, unusually low temperatures in southern Texas, brought about by a countrywide polar vortex, killed green anole lizards that lacked genes for “cold hardiness,” explains Shane Campbell-Staton, the UCLA biologist who documented the die-off. The…

“The persistence of elephant poaching has prompted researchers to wonder whether elephants really needed their tusks, and whether they might not be better off if the tuskless trait were to spread more widely through the African population.  Shane Campbell-Staton, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California,…

Scientists interested in finding specific genes that influence the behavior of humans and animals have a new tool, thanks to a two-year research effort aimed at describing how to apply the latest techniques of molecular genomics to the study of complex behavior.  “There’s a really steep learning curve when you get into genomics,…

If you or a family member received a consumer genetic testing kit as a holiday gift, you probably weren’t alone. Sales of at-home DNA testing kits reportedly soared in 2017, as people sought clues to their ancestry or future health. Some genetic-testing companies encouraged the purchase of kits as holiday gifts —…

Imagine a world in which mosquitoes choose blossoms over blood. Nice, right? There already exists a mosquito species called Wyeomyia smithii in which most of the bugs refuse blood meals in favor of sweet floral nectar. And new research is helping to explain the evolutionary genetics of the switch from blood sucker to flower fanatic. The researchers,…

The silky anteater (Cyclopes didactylus) has previously been recognized to be a single species divided into several sub-species. But a new genetic analysis, published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, suggests that this enigmatic mammal is not one species, but seven separate ones. Lead author Dr. Flávia Miranda, a researcher with…

Almost 15 years after scientists first sequenced the human genome, making sense of the enormous amount of data that encodes human life remains a formidable challenge. But it is also precisely the sort of problem that machine learning excels at. On Monday, Google released a tool called DeepVariant that uses the latest AI techniques…