23andMe, the DNA-testing kit service, has announced that it will now begin telling customers about the three mutations in the breast-cancer genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 (“Authorization for Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Test on Cancer Risk,” 2018). “Being the first and only direct-to-consumer genetics company to receive FDA authorization to test for cancer risk without a prescription is …
What if you could design your own children? As it turns out, we may not be far away from this. Thanks to CRISPR, scientists are honing in on the ability to alter DNA and create what we never could’ve imagined. (“Human embryos reportedly edited for first time in the US using CRISPR,” 2017) Shoukhrat Mitalipov of …
What if you could find out which diseases you may have through a breathalyzer test? As it turns out, scientists believe we may not be far off from this possibility. As researchers explain in a report published in ACS Nano, exhaled breath contains nitrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen, and small traces of more than 100 other …
If you’re a fan of fictional crime scene investigation programs, you know that DNA can be a pretty convincing piece of evidence. This is also the case in real life, but now, DNA isn’t the only proof investigators may have at their fingertips. A new paper published by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory …
The similarities between wolves and domesticated dogs is fairly obvious to us today, but exactly how long ago did our pups split from their descendants? Research published in Current Biology shows that it may have been more recently than we originally thought. The current assumption is that it occurred 15,000 years ago while humans were …
One factor I encountered again and again when I was working as a first responder was cause and effect. Whether a result was profitable or costly, it seemed like there was a whole team of people with no other purpose in life than to research why a particular outcome came to pass. There was even …