Tag: dna

What happens when you clone a mouse for 58 generations?

In 2005, a husband-and-wife team at Japan’s RIKEN institute ran an experiment with a mouse: clone it, then clone the clone, then clone that clone, and keep going. Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama and Dr. Sayaka Wakayama kept it up for 20 years — through lab moves, a 2011 earthquake, and the pandemic — requiring 30,947 individual cloning attempts to produce 58 successive generations, as summarized by Metacelsus.

Things went smoothly for a while. An interim report in 2013 showed 25 healthy generations with no decline in cloning efficiency or mouse health. But mutations were quietly accumulating. By generation 57, the mice carried over 3,400 single-base DNA changes compared to the original — a mutation rate 3.1 times higher than natural reproduction in the same mouse strain. Sexually reproducing animals can shake off harmful mutations through recombination, where chromosomes shuffle and bad copies get discarded. Clones have no such mechanism, so every error sticks.

The bigger problems were structural. Somewhere between generations 25 and 45, an entire X chromosome vanished and never came back. Chromosomal deletions, inversions, and translocations piled up alongside the point mutations. By generation 58, the cells simply wouldn’t produce viable clones anymore, and the project ended. The mice that were born at every stage lived normal lifespans — the process didn’t produce sickly animals, just increasingly fragile DNA that eventually couldn’t survive the cloning procedure itself.

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Oldest Dog DNA Ever Found Reveals How Ancient Our Friendship Really Is

The discovery of the oldest ever dog DNA suggests they have been our best friends for nearly 16,000 years – 5,000 years earlier than had previously been thought, new research said Wednesday.

Despite being ubiquitous in the homes, backyards and hearts of people across the world, surprisingly little is known about where dogs come from.

“It’s just an interesting mystery,” Swedish geneticist Pontus Skoglund of the UK’s Francis Crick Institute told reporters.

Dogs are most likely a mix of two types of grey wolves, he said. However exactly when dogs diverged from wolves has been difficult to trace, partly because their ancient bones are tricky to tell apart.

That is why scientists behind two new studies published in the journal Nature sequenced the genomes from archaeological remains, shedding light on the elusive origins of our furry friends.

The first study revealed that the world’s oldest canine DNA was discovered in a piece of a skull in Pinarbasi in what is now Turkey.

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Modern humans arrived in Australia 60,000 years ago and may have interbred with archaic humans such as ‘hobbits’

A new study of nearly 2,500 genomes may have finally settled the debate about when modern humans arrived in Australia. Using a diverse database of DNA from ancient and contemporary Aboriginal people throughout Oceania, researchers have determined that people began to settle northern Australia by 60,000 years ago and that they arrived via two distinct routes.

Experts have long debated the date that humans first arrived in Australia, a feat that required the invention of watercraft. While some researchers have used genetic models to support a “short chronology” of 47,000 to 51,000 years ago for the arrival, others have marshaled archaeological evidence and Aboriginal knowledge in support of the “long chronology,” in which the first arrivals happened 60,000 to 65,000 years ago.

In the new study, published Friday (Nov. 28) in the journal Science Advances, researchers analyzed an “unprecedentedly large” dataset of 2,456 human genomes to answer the question of when humans journeyed from Sunda (the ancient landmass, also known as Sundaland, that included what are today Indonesia, the Philippines and the Malaysian Peninsula) to Sahul (a paleocontinent that included modern-day Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea).

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Genetic Study Rewrites the Story of Human and Neanderthal Interbreeding, Pointing to Social Interaction, Not Just Survival

Recent genetic research indicates that interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals strongly favored female sapiens and male Neanderthal pairs, demonstrating that social interactions guided human evolution, previously believed to be governed solely by the survival of the fittest.

University of Pennsylvania researchers from the lab of Sarah Tishkoff revealed their findings in a study published in Science, which accounts for the tendency of Neanderthal DNA, common among populations of non-African descent, being largely absent from the X chromosome.

Previously, researchers had assumed that natural selection removed Neanderthal DNA from X chromosomes due to incompatibility or potentially harmful interactions with modern human DNA that would have produced less viable offspring.

Neanderthal DNA and X Chromosome

The chromosomal difference is significant because females are more likely than males to pass on an X chromosome to their offspring, suggesting a sex bias in interbreeding. The team also found that Neanderthals carried an excess of modern human DNA on their own X chromosomes, mirroring the pattern observed in modern humans.

These findings on the X-chromosome point to mating pairs consisting primarily of female Homo sapiens and male Neanderthals. The human genome preserves a long record of migrations, encounters, and intermixing between ancient populations, passing on shared ancestry to modern populations.

“Along our X chromosomes, we have these missing swaths of Neanderthal DNA we call ‘Neanderthal deserts,’” said co-first author Alexander Platt, a senior research scientist in the Tishkoff Lab. “For years, we just assumed these deserts existed because certain Neanderthal genes were biologically ‘toxic’ to humans—as tends to be the case when species diverge—so we thought the genes may have caused health problems and were likely purged by natural selection.”

Analyzing the Human and Neanderthal Genomes

The researchers examined alleles—variations in a gene at the same position on a chromosome—and compared human alleles on the X chromosome of three Neanderthals with alleles from an African genome, known to have not encountered Neanderthals.

“What we found was a striking imbalance,” says co-first author Daniel Harris, a research associate in the Tishkoff lab. “While modern humans lack Neanderthal X chromosomes, Neanderthals had a 62% excess of modern human DNA on their X chromosomes compared to their other chromosomes.”

The comparison revealed an unexpected reversal: human DNA appeared preferentially on the X chromosome in both species. This ruled out incompatibility or gene-interaction problems as the primary explanation. If such incompatibilities existed, human DNA would also have been filtered out of the Neanderthal X chromosome.

Instead, researchers concluded that mating patterns best explained the data. Males carry one X and one Y chromosome, while females carry two X chromosomes and therefore contribute X chromosomes more frequently to future generations. If male Neanderthals commonly mated with female Homo sapiens, the result would be fewer Neanderthal X chromosomes and more human X chromosomes in later populations.

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Jeffrey Epstein Recruited NSA Codebreakers for Genome “Manhattan Project”

In the decade before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. and Russia were engaged in high-stakes exchanges of advanced technology involving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Skolkovo Innovation Center—a Russian government-backed technology hub that aimed to jump-start a “venture” innovation ecosystem in Moscow.

Jeffrey Epstein sat at the crossroads of academia, philanthropy, and venture finance as these global capital flows were threatened by the brewing confrontation in Ukraine.

In 2013, during the early cryptocurrency boom, Epstein sought an audience with Vladimir Putin to encourage the Russian president to shift course from the MIT–Skolkovo model. Instead of playing “catch up” with the United States through venture-backed startups, Epstein proposed, Russia could help lead a new financial system based on a novel global currency.

Epstein funded the early development of cryptocurrency through the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, founded in 2015. MIT’s Bitcoin Core Development Fund helped pay bitcoin’s early developers to maintain the open-source software authored by Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin’s anonymous inventor. Epstein was an early investor in Coinbase, and he was friends with Brock Pierce, the co-founder of U.S. dollar stablecoin company Tether, which operates, in effect, the world’s largest crypto bank.

Epstein was also recruiting cryptographers to a more ambitious project: hacking the human genome. In an email to a redacted recipient in August 2012, Epstein wrote, “My biology gurus at harvard all agree that the signal intelligence used by the various agencies , could be put to work on breaking the dna code or protein signal problems. breaking foreign codes is the expertise of the us and nsa.” Epstein prompted the recipient to help him recruit “code breakers” from the various intelligence agencies: “it would be great to know which agency button to push.”

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Democrat Pima County Sheriff is Blocking FBI Access to Key Evidence After DNA and Glove Found Inside Nancy Guthrie Home

The FBI says the Democrat Pima County Sheriff is blocking evidence in the Nancy Guthrie disappearance case, according to Reuters and Fox News.

The Pima County Sheriff is blocking FBI access to key evidence in the investigation into Nancy Guthrie, according to Reuters.

— Brian Entin (@BrianEntin) February 13, 2026

According to reporting from Fox News, DNA and a glove were found inside of Nancy Guthrie’s home and Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos is blocking the feds from examining the new evidence.

“The FBI wanted to send DNA and a glove found inside the house to their lab at Quantico Virginia for testing. The sheriff here, the Pima County Sheriff, insisted instead on sending it to a private lab that is based in Florida!” – Fox News reported.

“Now obviously you would think that there is nowhere better in the country, never even in the world, than the FBI’s lab in Quantico for that kind of testing.”

“The Guthrie family hoping tonight that the infighting stops and finding Nancy Guthrie really gets underway here, because that is what the Guthrie family wants to hear. Not the people are fighting about who has jurisdiction, but what they’re doing to find Nancy Guthrie.”

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Bay Area scientist launches new company with sights on gene-edited babies

Last month, as he announced the launch, he said that Preventive has raised almost $30 million from private funding.

The funding is reportedly coming from some heavy hitters in the tech world, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his husband Oliver Mulherin.

Harrington also said his team included leading experts in the fields of reproductive technology, reproductive medicine and genome-editing.

“Our goal is straightforward,” he wrote, “to determine through rigorous preclinical work whether preventive gene editing can be developed safely to spare families from severe disease.”

Harrington acknowledged the major ethical concerns around the science and the gray areas in the regulatory process, which he said, have opened the field to potentially detrimental outcomes. 

“The combination of limited expert involvement and lack of a clear regulatory pathway has created conditions for fringe groups to take dangerous shortcuts that could harm patients and stifle responsible investigation,” the researchers said, adding, “Given that this technology has the potential to save millions of lives, we do not want this to happen.”

Gene editing can only be used in in vitro fertilization to allow for the first step of genetic testing on an embryo.

“It requires IVF because you have to have the embryo in a dish,” explained Stanford law professor Henry (Hank) Greely, a leading expert on ethical, legal, and social implications in bioscience technologies.

Once a test determines an embryo has the DNA makeup of a genetic disease, for example, like Huntington’s or cystic fibrosis, scientists would then use the DNA editing technique known as Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR, to make alterations to the DNA.

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DHS Invokes Immigration Enforcement To Justify Gathering Americans’ DNA

Government agencies inevitably turn enforcement responsibilities into opportunities to extend the security state. Every initiative to document, monitor, track, or otherwise spy on Americans starts with a mandate to ensure that people are obeying some rule or law. So it is with immigration policies, which fuel government efforts to gather biometric information not just on those who want to enter the country, but on citizens born and raised here. Fortunately, the scheme is getting pushback.

Massive Data Sweep Hiding in a Proposed Rule Change

On November 3 of last year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proposed a rule change allowing its agents to gather and store more biometric data on anybody associated with applications for “benefits” including family visas, Permanent Resident (green) Cards, and work permits. The DHS summary of the rule states, in part:

DHS proposes to require submission of biometrics by any individual, regardless of age, filing or associated with an immigration benefit request, other request, or collection of information, unless exempted; expand biometrics collection authority upon alien arrest; define “biometrics;” codify reuse requirements; codify and expand DNA testing, use and storage; establish an “extraordinary circumstances” standard to excuse a failure to appear at a biometric services appointment…

According to the proposal, the purpose of gathering biometric data, including fingerprints, photographs, signatures, voice prints, ocular images, and DNA (which is heavily emphasized by DHS) is “identity management” to verify that people are who they say they are.

Immigrants aren’t especially popular in certain U.S. circles at the moment, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that leniency towards those who want to enter the country is unpopular. But the rule change also ropes in lots of Americans. The proposal specifies that “by ‘associated,’ DHS means a person with substantial involvement or participation in the immigration benefit request, other request, or collection of information, such as a named derivative, beneficiary, petitioner’s signatory, sponsor, or co-applicant.”

As attorneys Alessandra Carbajal, Lee Gibbs Depret-Bixio, and Ryan Mosser  note in an analysis, the new rule would affect not just immigrants but “U.S. citizens, nationals, and lawful permanent residents, regardless of age.” They add that “signatories for employers that serve as sponsors/petitioners may potentially be subject to biometrics requirements. This would mark a departure from current practice, where only foreign nationals seeking benefits typically provide biometrics.”

“This data collection would not be limited to just immigrants, it would also impact millions of American citizens,” agrees Institute for Justice (I.J.) attorney Tahmineh Dehbozorgi. “DHS is claiming this DNA collection is meant to serve one narrow purpose, but realistically, it is creating a vast genetic dragnet that endangers the Fourth Amendment rights of everyone, all without Congress’ approval.”

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Fallout From Chernobyl Might Be Creating A New Kind Of Dog

Dogs are humanity’s best friend, and this is partially because we’ve bred them to better suit our preferences and needs. The Alaskan Malamute and Komondor, for example, were intentionally bred to serve specific roles (pulling sleds across the Arctic and guarding sheep from predators, respectively, in these two cases). It’s not just breeding that can produce new types of dogs, though. The harrowing damage to the ecosystem left in the infamous Chernobyl disaster’s wake may be contributing, too.

The April 1986 calamity caused ecological damage so severe that it will continue to scar the land for generations to come. In fact, according to Time, the director of the Chernobyl plant, Ihor Gramotkin, has stated that it would be “at least 20,000 years” before the plant’s immediate area would be safe again. The dangers of radiation exposure are severe, and the further scientists are able to study animals that live in the wider area, the better they can understand those effects. The local dog population has been regularly exposed for some time, as they shelter in the dangerously radioactive Semikhody train station. The area is still extremely hazardous, and Russian military activity throughout the exclusion zone could have far-reaching effects.

A 2023 study published on ScienceAdvances titled “The dogs of Chernobyl: Demographic insights into populations inhabiting the nuclear exclusion zone” investigated the DNA of some of these dogs and found that “genome-wide profiles from Chernobyl, purebred and free-breeding dogs, worldwide reveal that the individuals from the power plant and Chernobyl City are genetically distinct.”

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DNA Evidence Proves “First Black Briton” Was Actually A White Girl

In 2021 the establishment media was electrified by a discovery involving the ancient remains of a woman found over a century ago near a village in East Sussex in Britain.  The reason leftist journalists were so hyped?  A supposedly comprehensive study by “experts” in facial reconstruction had determined that the nearly 2000 year old skeleton belonged to a Sub-Saharan African person.

The remains became known as the “Beachy Head Woman” and images of her reconstructed black face began circulating internationally.  This was proof, somehow, that progressives had always been right to support third world immigration.

The new data arrived conveniently in time to support a far-left campaign to defend the ideas of multiculturalism.  Part of this narrative asserts that Caucasian regions of the world have never actually been Caucasian and that western culture doesn’t really exist.  In fact, white Europeans have no claim to any lands anywhere, they have no home, and African/Asian migrants have “always” freely traveled throughout Europe.

The political left was enthralled, taking to social media and reposting the discovery millions of times over to “own the fascists”.  The BBC even paid to have a plaque constructed on the site where the bones were discovered proudly proclaiming that this is where the first Briton of “African origin” had been found.

School lessons were immediately developed in the UK, teaching students about the multicultural history of Britain.  This was scientific confirmation to back up the avalanche of European entertainment content depicting Sub-Saharan Africans as integral to the history of the continent, roaming the lands as tribesman or enjoying the finery of royal court.   

Leftists argue that their version of history justifies the expansion of open mass immigration, because “things have always been this way” and white people today who want to protect their histories and cultures from erasure are merely ignorant of the past.  

The problem is, Beachy Head Woman is not African or black.  Recently confirmed DNA evidence shows she was white with blonde hair and blue eyes.  She was not a migrant, but born in ancient Britain.

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