If your great-grandparents lived through a famine, their experience could well have altered their genetic code. And three generations later you could well be showing signs of that change. The idea that…
Adrian Bird, Howard Cedar and Aharon Razin were hotly tipped to win this year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine for their pioneering work in the field of epigenetics. They didn’t win. But their nomination is…
Ashwellthorpe Lower Wood in Norfolk, England has been managed by coppicing, an ancient form of forestry, for more than a thousand years. It was recorded as coppiced woodland in the Domesday Book published…
Imagine a lake so salty its water exists in a liquid state at -20 °C – then picture something thriving in that seemingly lethal environment. Such an organism exists; several of them, in fact. In a paper…
You get hauled out of bed in the morning not just because of an alarm clock. We are genetically encoded with a 24-hour (circadian) body clock that allows us to live in harmony with our environment. But…
Sex in mammals, including mouse and human, is determined genetically and depends on the paternal sex chromosome - X or Y - received at the time of fertilisation. If nothing goes wrong, an XX individual…
Contaminated during the surrounding area’s history of mining, the River Hayle in Cornwall contains metals including copper, zinc, nickel and cadmium at levels that can kill brown trout, a particularly…
The display of a frozen mammoth in Japan has again raised questions as to the possibility of creating a live born clone of extinct animals. Theoretically, mammoths could be cloned by recovering, reconstructing…
A news report recently informed readers that the reason children from poorer backgrounds struggle is due to genetic “inherited abilities”. According to the article, a new Productivity Commission report…
Our genetic material is encoded in DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). DNA is famous. But you may also have also heard of RNA (ribonucleic acid). So, what is RNA, and what is it good for? Quite a lot really…
When scientists first decided to sequence the human genome, it seemed an impossibly large and complicated challenge. A decade since achieving this aim, scientists are faced with a similarly overwhelming…
The front-page of The Times carried a story today that William could be “Britain’s first king to have proven Indian ancestry”. The story continues inside, along with an advert for the personal DNA testing…
An ancestor of Prince William’s from the 19th century was half Indian, according to The Times. This claim is based on analysis of his distant cousins’ DNA. We have such technology today, but how comfortable…
Australian researchers have uncovered the mechanism by which a rare genetic mutation causes premature deafness in people in their early twenties, paving the way for early detection for this type of hearing…
Melanomas may be less common than other skin cancers but their ability to become malignant and spread to other parts of the body makes them some of the deadliest if not caught early. More than 10,000 people…
Our series, Animals in Research, profiles the top organisms used for science experimentation. Here, we look at a species familiar to most: Mus musculus, or the mouse. Mice have been close companions of…
Visiting Professor in Biomedical Ethics, Murdoch Children's Research Institute; Distinguished Visiting Professor in Law, University of Melbourne; Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics, University of Oxford