A single human being’s DNA contains as much information as fifty novels.
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A single human being’s DNA contains…
After just under a year in space…
After just under a year in space, astronaut Scott Kelly’s gene expression changed significantly and it’s different to his identical twin brother’s DNA. A new NASA statement suggests the physical and mental stresses of Scott Kelly’s year in orbit may have activated hundreds of “space genes” that altered the astronaut’s immune system, bone formation, eyesight […]
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Oral tradition in Kenya tells…
Oral tradition in Kenya tells that 20 shipwrecked Chinese sailors washed up on shore in the 15th century and were given permission to settle and marry into local tribes. DNA tests conducted by China’s government in 2002 on one of the supposed descendants and found that she was of Chinese descent.
Mysterious Skeleton of Powerful Viking Warrior Confirmed to be Female
Back in 1878, archaeologists came across a Viking burial chamber in an important trade center known as Birka. Judging by the way the body had bee placed into the grave, they assessed that it must have belonged to a prominent Viking warrior.
The body was found buried with their weapons, fancy clothes, and two horses. The assumption at the time was that the remains must have been those of a man,but a DNA study concluded that the remains were biologically female.
Image Credit: Wikipedia
Critics of the findings argued that the weapons could have belonged to her husband or that there could have been two skeletons in the grave and the analysis was done on the wrong one. They argued that thinking that women were Viking warriors is wishful thinking and that we don’t have enough historical evidence to support the claim.
Researchers, though, are defending their findings in the journal Antiquity, saying the remains buried in the chamber are “unassailably female.” They confirm that there was only one skeleton in the grave, so they couldn’t have mixed up the remains, and asserted that all documentation was correct.
Image Credit: Wikipedia
“Grave Bj.581 had only one human occupant,” confirms Professor Neil Price to IFLScience. “An extra thigh-bone in the Bj.581 museum storage box – much hyped by our online critics – is clearly labeled as coming from another grave and had just been misplaced in the wrong box (the possibility of which is why bones are labeled to begin with!).”
He also continues to make an even finer point:
“To those who do take issue, we suggest that it is not supportable to react only now, when the individual has been shown to be female, without explaining why neither the warrior interpretations nor any supposed source-critical factors were a problem when the person in Bj.581 was believed to be male.”
Ideas about gender, of course, are not set in stone and vary between cultures, so it’s fair to say the skeleton could belong to a person who was both a female and a warrior, and also to accept the fact that being a woman might not have meant the same thing in that culture as it does in ours today.
Image Credit: Wikipedia
Professor Price agrees.
“The body’s XX chromosomes revealed in the genomic study provide an unambiguously female sex determination, but the gender of the Bj.581 individual is a different matter. There is, of course, a broad spectrum of possibilities, many of them involving contested contemporary terminologies that can also be problematic to apply to people of the past.”
The archaeologists on the study expect that, in the future, we’ll probably find more and more Viking Age female warriors, whether they’re new finds or reassessments of remains already catalogued.
The future – and the past – is female, it would seem.
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Police Solved a 25-Year-Old Murder by Using Ancestry DNA Data and a Dirty Napkin
Most of think that all these new DNA testing services are just a fun way to find out what mix of ethnicities you really are. Maybe you’ll discover an ancestor who was on the Mayflower, or get connected to a long-lost cousin.
It turns out, however, that the DNA databases you’re submitting your sample to can also be utilized by law enforcement agencies, helping them do things like, oh, let’s say, linking the DNA they got from the spit on your Chipotle napkin to the evidence from that cold-case murder you’ve managed to keep covered up since the 1990s.
Image Credit: Pixabay
Hope you enjoyed that extra guac. It’s the last you’re going to get for a while.
Minnesota businessman Jerry Westrom, 52, was arrested by police after his DNA was linked to crime scene evidence from the scene of 35-year-old Jeanie Childs 1993 stabbing death. They got that DNA from a napkin he tossed into a trash can at his daughter’s hockey game. He was brought in for questioning and, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, denied all allegations, but the hard evidence meant he still had to post $1 million bail for his release. (Lest you feel sorry for Mr. Westrom, the DNA matched sperm found on a towel and a comforter in the murdered woman’s apartment. Gross.)
Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office
This isn’t the first time a personal ancestry company has helped police solve a cold case. DNA that matched records from one such company helped solve the 1986 murder of a 12-year-old girl in Washington State, and also helped catch the notorious Golden State Killer. A lot of people are up in arms about the ethics of using DNA matches from these databases to justify arrests, saying that most people send their spit to these companies for entertainment’s sake, and they don’t expect their distant cousins to get arrested as a result.
Image Credit: Pixabay
Police say that’s too bad. They’ve been using DNA evidence to solve cases, both hot and cold, for decades. Bio-data companies, recreational or not, are just one more source of that information – and they’re exploding in popularity. Considering that these services can match you up with third and fourth cousins based on one little q-tip of spit, a lot more criminals can look forward to the very real possibility of being arrested for a crime committed decades ago.
So, if you have any literal skeletons in your closet, or really anywhere that police may have noticed at any point in time…you may want to think twice before throwing out your used napkins.
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New Research Reveals Sleep Deprivation Can Actually Damage Your DNA
Tough news for anyone who’s having trouble getting enough sleep (so, basically all of us): a recent study published in Anaesthesia confirms that lack of sleep is so bad for your health, it can actually f*** up your DNA. This, in turn, can cause serious health problems down the road. It’s the first study to “quantify DNA damage directly in young adults who are required to work overnight shifts.”
The research team was out of Hong Kong and studied 49 healthy doctors. 24 of them worked overnight shifts between 5 and 6 times a month. The participants gave blood when they were rested and also after they pulled all-nighters, and gave other health information as well in order to rule out factors that could influence the study.
Image Credit: Pixabay
What they found was that even when the doctors who regularly went without sleep were well-rested, their DNA had lower gene expression, more DNA breaks, and generally appeared more damaged than those doctors who never stayed up all night.
Why does it matter? Well, DNA damage has been linked to a host of health issues, like heart attacks, diabetes, and certain types of cancer – a meta-analysis of 2 million people found a link between working night shifts and the incidence of breast tumors.
Dr. Siu-Wai Choi of Hong Kong University and senior author of the study, said in a statement:
“Although this work is very preliminary, it is clear from the results that even a single night of sleep deprivation can trigger events that may contribute to the development of chronic disease.”
This is, of course, just one single study, and more research is needed to determine the significance of the relationship between the DNA damage and the sleep deprivation. The sample doctors who were often pulling overnighters tended to be younger than the other group and all of the participants were of Chinese descent. A much wider study would need to be conducted to confirm findings.
Image Credit: Pixabay
“This study is important in that it will allow future researchers to study the impact of changing the way we work and other interventions by evaluation DNA breaks in the same way as the authors of this groundbreaking study have done.”
There are other factors that could come into play, like shift workers having a greater predisposition to suffering from chronic illness, changes to activity and eating patterns, and disruptions to circadian rhythms and sex hormone balances.
Even though the findings need to be confirmed, it seems safe to say that if you take care to do everything you can to stay healthy in the future, don’t skimp on the sleep – it’s as important as anything else you do with your body.
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These People’s Families Were Upended by DNA Websites, and Here Are Their Stories
I know a lot of people who have done DNA tests and gotten some fascinating results. Personally, I’m still wary of handing over my DNA to some corporation, who could easily decide to sell their database of information to, say, a pharmaceutical company.
Judging by these responses from AskReddit users, I think I might have the right idea.
1. Holier than thou
“Spouse found out his dad wasn’t his dad. His judgmental holier than thou Catholic mom had some explaining to do. He lost an immense amount of respect for her, especially when the bio dad tried to reach out to him. She is still in contact with the married man she had an affair with over 4 decades ago. He refuses to speak to him and has limited contact with her.”
2. Neanderthal
“I discovered that I have some of the highest known Neanderthal DNA, more than 99% users and over 4% of my total DNA. 3 tests submitted and a flight provided to a university in Australia for a testing. Was cool at first, and then not.
It bothered my wife a bit at first thanks to watching a couple documentaries.”
3. No one ever told them
“Not me, but one of my bar regulars did the test with her older sister. Turns out not only are they not related to each other, but both of them are adopted. And, their adoptive parents are both dead. And, their entire extended family knew the whole time but no one ever told them.”
4. I feel like this probably happens a lot
“I found out I’m not Irish after taking one….I have an Irish tattoo. My mom’s family always bragged about how Irish we were. My life obviously wasn’t destroyed but funny anyways.
It was over twenty years ago, I was 18 and stupid. The tattoo is a nautical compass with a Celtic knot in the middle on my shoulder.”
5. A happy ending
“My story has a rough beginning, but a happy ending. I apologize, this will be a bit lengthy.
I ordered 23andme to try to figure out “what” I was, not to track down any long lost family members. I had known since I was a teenager that my dad who raised me wasn’t my biological father. I used to ask my mom if I was adopted because I don’t look like anyone in my family.
My mom is almost 100% Irish and my dad (who raised me, he is and always will be my dad) is also Caucasian and I look a bit ethnically ambiguous. Olive (but fair) skin, dark hair, and green eyes; no one else in my family looked like me. My mom finally told me the truth when i was 16.
When I got my report back, I was mostly European by my breakdown, I was still confused. I had several cousins show up, but contacting them didn’t interest me at all. One day I got a notification that I had new relatives and a half sister popped up. This caught me completely off guard and I didn’t know what to do…because I wanted to contact her.
For the first time ever, I wanted to know more. I messaged her, not telling anything about myself, just that if she’d like to know more about me, I would be open with all that I knew. I never got a reply, this kind of broke my heart if I’m being honest, but I accepted that she probably knew nothing of me and that the revelation of my existence may have hurt their family horribly.
A few months later a second cousin popped up and she was shown to be the first cousin of my “half sister,” this confused me even more. Why was she my second cousin and my half sisters first cousin?She contacted me because she thought I may have answers for her, I told her that I had tried to contact my half sister but heard nothing and apologized for not being able to help her. (Her story is oddly similar to mine.) She also told me that she had communicated briefly with her first cousin, but after bringing me up, she cut off contact with her.
That made me feel horrible. But through our brief interaction, i realized that the three of us were connected through my “half sisters” maternal blood line. I know my mom is my mom, there’s no question there, so I started thinking, how could this be?..then I realized that my “half sister” was actually my aunt, my biological father’s sister. Half-siblings, aunts and uncles, and grandparents all share 25% of their DNA, all the connections on these websites are based on probability.
I messaged her again and told her that I thought she may be my aunt and I told her more about myself…my birthdate and where I was conceived, and that if she had a brother who was in that area at that time, he was my biological father. She messaged me back in no time. It turns out that my paternal grandfather had passed away years ago and when she got the first message and saw the half sister connection, she assumed her father had a child that none of them knew about. I’m younger than her and her siblings, obviously, so I would have come along after them.
She didn’t contact me because she didn’t want to hurt her mother, and I’m sure she was hurt by this too. I understood, completely. She then went on to tell me that they all knew about me but didn’t want to disrupt my life. She said my biological father never forgot about me…I had always thought I was his dirty little secret. (He and my mother were both married to other people when I was conceived..that’s another long story.)
Anyways, my husband, children, and I have since met them all. I actually have three half siblings that also knew about me. It was so strange to finally meet people who I resemble. I’m a spitting image of my paternal grandmother when she was young, they were all blown away by that. We stay in contact and I couldn’t be happier that I bought the 23andme kit.”
6. Scandalous
“My 75-year-old grandmother just found out her dad was not her real dad. Turns out her mom had an affair with the family doctor and never told a single soul. Not only did she find out her family doctor was her real dad (the one who birthed not only her but also all of her own children) but turns out this family doctor was sleeping with a lot his patients.
She now has a bunch of new half sisters and brothers, some of them knew who their real dad was and some of them didn’t. My great grandmother was quite the secret keeper.”
7. White mystery
“My dad turned out not to be my dad. So the basic 23andMe family surprise I guess? Also found out that my heritage can best be described as white mystery.”
8. Pissed
“When my birth mom was pregnant with me she was too ashamed to admit who my father was. She was too young to be a mom and so she gave me to my current parents when I was born.(they were 10 years older than her and already had a kid) I love my parents and couldn’t care who my birth father was but I wanted to see what I was made of.
Everyone was pretty pissed when we found out my dad was my birth dad.”
9. At least three
“Not destroyed, it just confirmed what we already knew that there was more than one Father between 5 siblings. At least three as it turned out.”
10. Dreading the future
“My grandpa passed away from Alzheimer’s, so my family uploaded our raw DNA to another site to see if any of us have the same genes that make it likely for any of the rest of us to have it as well. Luckily most of us didn’t have the gene my grandpa had, but my uncles have it. So while my immediate family knows we’ve got average chances, my poor uncles are probably dreading the future.”
11. Finding family
“I’ve been searching for my father my whole life and through 23andme I just found a half-brother, finally answering the question. Our father is unfortunately passed, but we’re meeting in person in April.
A couple weeks after we found each other we were also contacted by another half-sister.”
12. Inconclusive
“My brother got our whole family 23andMe kits for Christmas last year. Everyone did the swab and got their results back which showed how we’re all related and yada yada yada, but my results came back inconclusive. 23andMe sent me a new kit to do it again and THAT one also came back inconclusive. So the company sent me an email basically saying I can never do it again probably because I’m using a bunch of resources with no results.
Anyway now my family says I don’t have any human DNA and that I must be a lizard. They make lizard sounds when I’m around and I am ashamed.”
13. What are the chances?
“Kind of the opposite. I found out I have an older sister, apparently my dad was being a little promiscuous lol. RIP old man. And she also shares my birthday, what are the chances?!”
14. He didn’t know
“I just got off the phone with my newly found bio dad. My mom died in 1980, my dad in 2012. I logged Friday in to AncestryDNA to get my results from their Black Friday sale. It said that this person in NC was my father, no doubt. Turns out it was my moms boyfriend before my dad came along. I have no idea if anyone knew. My newly found father certainly didn’t.”
15. Oh, Papa
“Ours was backwards. A French lady messaged my mom and said she thought they shared a father. Very believable because Papa was a proven whore. Sure enough she did a 23andMe and sure enough papa is a great big slut. Rest in peace.”
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The same Gene that causes…
The same Gene that causes Asian people to “flush” when drinking alcohol causes a 4 times increase in DNA damage, and a much higher rate of heart and cancer problems from drinking alcohol.
Of all the humans tested so far…
Of all the humans tested so far, everyone has contained the same DNA from 1 of at least 2 ancestors. Mitochondrial DNA being traced back matrilineally to a specific “mT-Eve,” and a Y-chromosome being traced back patrilineally to a specific “Y-chromosomal Adam.” We are not descended from a singular couple, but rather we are all […]
Known as Cheddar Man, a 9,000 year old skeleton..
Known as Cheddar Man, a 9,000 year old skeleton was found in a cave in Cheddar, England. After DNA testing, a living relative was found half a mile away, linking back 300 generations.