A Paranthropus robustus skull.Credit: Sabena Jane Merlo/Alamy Human hominids and their ancient relatives emerged in Africa about seven million years ago. Now researchers have gathered genetic information from an African hominid who lived two million years ago, the oldest data ever recovered. The protein sequences, described in a preprint posted on the bioRxiv server on … Read more
IIn January 2017, I met Jiankui He, the now-infamous Chinese scientist who would go on to create the world’s first genome-edited babies. This occurred during a meeting in Berkeley, California hosted by Jennifer Doudna who, along with Emmanuelle Charpentier, was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on CRISPR genome-editing technology. In … Read more
Both explosions and implosions create heat to some extent, and vaporization can occur when things get very hot, but only under the right circumstances. The phenomenon sees liquids transition into a gaseous state when enough energy is released to break the intermolecular forces holding them together. Vaping is a dramatic phase change that requires a … Read more
image: Joel D. Richter, PhD, and Sneha Shah, PhD visualization Moreover Credit: UMass Chan Medical School An antisense therapy developed by Joel D. Richter, PhD, Sneha Shah, PhD, and Jonathan K. Watts, PhD, at UMass Chan Medical School and Elizabeth Berry-Kravis, MD, PhD, at RUSH University Medical Center, restores production of the FMRP protein in … Read more
The MAFDA system can track individual flies within a larger group, identify behaviors, and compare those behaviors to fruit fly genotypes. (Photo by Tulane University) How to tell if a fruit fly is hungry? Ask a computer. While it may sound like a bad dad joke, it’s a reality at Tulane University, where researchers have … Read more
Researchers at the UNC School of Medicine are using evolutionary genomics to understand human disease. They focus on genes that are unchanged and highly constrained through mammalian evolution. This new perspective makes it possible to trace psychiatric and neurological disorders to alterations in these genes. This could provide insights into various mental health conditions and … Read more
