Ancient DNA is turning human prehistory into something startlingly intimate. Instead of a clean handoff from one species to another, the last 50,000 years look more like a long, tangled story of ...

For decades, biologists have known that the instructions for life are written in DNA, yet the vast majority of those letters seemed to sit in the dark, doing little that was obvious. Now a new ...

Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN) today announced a sequencing agreement with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (SDZWA)’s Frozen Zoo®. The 50-year-old biobank is the world’s most comprehensive and diverse ...

We are getting a clearer sense of where and how often Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred, and it turns out the behaviour ...

WTOP’s Matt Kaufax takes an even deeper dive into the Smithsonian Natural History Museum’s “Ocean Library” through DNA collection.

A groundbreaking brain atlas maps nearly 680,000 cells to reveal how the human brain develops at the single-cell level. The discovery could transform Parkinson’s research by setting new standards for ...

Gene therapy holds the promise of preventing and curing disease by manipulating gene expression within a patient's cells. However, to be effective, the new gene must make it into a cell's nucleus. The ...

In 1869, Swiss scientist Friedrich Miescher isolated a mysterious substance from cell nuclei—an overlooked finding that would ...

Fossils from a Moroccan cave have been dated with remarkable accuracy to about 773,000 years ago, thanks to a magnetic ...

Scientists analyzing ancient DNA from a 12,000-year-old double burial in southern Italy uncovered genetic evidence of a rare inherited growth disorder in two closely related prehistoric individuals. A ...

The evolution of the human species is marked by an increase in brain size. Now new research suggests that could be partly ...