Tag: dna

New Genetic Study of the Famous ‘Shroud of Turin’ Reopens Debate Over the Controversial Relic’s Origins

The Shroud of Turin, purported by many to have been the burial cloth that once covered the body of Jesus at the time of his burial, remains one of the most controversial relics in all of history.

For centuries, the shroud was believed to preserve rare historical evidence of the seemingly miraculous events described in the New Testament. However, by the 20th century, a growing number of scholars had come to believe the shroud’s origins were likely to be far more recent: perhaps the result of a clever forgery produced sometime in the Middle Ages.

Now, according to the findings of a new genetic study, it seems the lingering questions over the shroud and its origins are far from being settled, revealing a wide range of encounters the Turin Shroud has had with humans, animals, and other objects, and offering new clues about the environments that it met over time.

Obscure Origins

The mysterious shroud, which has remained a curiosity to scholars for centuries, has been preserved in Turin, Italy, since the late 16th century. The relic depicts the ghostly image of what appears to be a male human body, as well as evidence of markings that indicate blood in the positions on the body that are traditionally consistent with New Testament accounts of the injuries Jesus bore at the time of his crucifixion.

Over the decades, studies have sought to help determine the true origins of the unusual relic, leading to a range of theories about its provenance. After centuries of debate among scholars, in 1978, scientific efforts to determine the shroud’s origins were undertaken, which included samples with remnants of DNA that its woven material has collected over time.

Ultimately, testing completed in 1988 suggested that the shroud most likely dated to no earlier than the 13th century, although the debate over its history has continued.

Reopening the Debate

Now, in a new international study effort led by Italian scientists, recent genetic studies involving the original samples collected in 1978 are helping to shed additional light on the complex nature of the interactions the shroud has had with its environment over the centuries.

The team, whose findings appear in a new preprint paper that appears on the bioRxiv website, reports that their analysis showcases the preservation conditions of the shroud over time, as well as interactions it has had with its environment that reveal “its biological complexity through rigorous DNA and metagenomic analyses.”

According to the study’s authors, “The possible existence of the Shroud prior to the first documented information places the long journey of this artifact into a Middle or Near East geographical context, with a potential historical age preceding the Sacking of Constantinople in

1204.” Sometime later, scholars believe the shroud was moved to a new location in Western Europe, before it resurfaced again near the French commune of Lirey in the early to mid 1350s.

Some of the questions about the shroud’s journey throughout the centuries is evidenced by the genetic material it carries, and through analysis, the study’s authors hoped to learn about the kinds of environments where it had been kept, dividing the chronological history of the relic into a “pre-1204” period that it was believed to have been kept in the ancient Near East, and what the team refers to as “a plausible ‘post-1353’ location in western Europe.”

“These two hypothetical temporal and spatial differentiations may be reflected in the variation of DNA data obtained from the Shroud,” the study’s authors say.

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Trace DNA Found on Shroud of Turin Suggests ‘Unexpected’ Connection to India

Scientists examining DNA contained on the Shroud of Turin were surprised to find evidence indicating that the materials used to make the relic may have originated in India. The fascinating study reportedly involved researchers re-examining samples collected from the controversial artifact in 1978, with the intention of gaining new insights from the genetic information left behind on the pieces. In detailing their analysis of the trace DNA, the scientists revealed that they detected a remarkably diverse array of plants and animals that had their proverbial prints on the relic.

But what particularly intrigued scientists were their findings with regard to the people who came into contact with the shroud. Specifically, the researchers noted that nearly 40 percent of the human DNA found on the relic was from “Indian lineages.” This “unexpected” result, they noted, “is potentially linked to historical interactions associated with importing linen or yarn from regions near the Indus Valley.” Alas, given the complex history of the relic, the scientists were unable to determine its age based on the trace DNA from “centuries of social, cultural, and ecological engagement” with the shroud.

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Ted Bundy named as killer of teen girl who left a Halloween party and never returned after DNA breakthrough

Notorious serial killer Ted Bundy has been identified as the murderer of a teenage girl who vanished on Halloween night more than half a century ago.

Laura Ann Aime, 17, was last seen alive at a party in Utah County on October 31, 1974, when she told friends she was heading out to buy cigarettes. She never returned.

Around a month later on November 27, 1974, her naked body was found in an embankment up in the mountains near American Fork Canyon Road. The teen had been raped and strangled.

For decades, her murder has been linked to Bundy, with the serial killer giving a deathbed confession to killing Aime and at least 29 other victims before he was sent to the electric chair in January 1989.

But, her case remained unsolved for the next 37 years, with investigators needing more evidence to close the investigation once and for all.

That evidence finally arrived in the way of a breakthrough in DNA evidence last month.

In a press conference on Wednesday, Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith announced that advanced DNA testing of bodily fluids found on the victim had proven Bundy to be the killer once and for all.  

‘Although Bundy did claim that he committed the murder of Laura, the confession he gave was deemed to be not enough evidence to close the case and rule out any other party having had committed this crime, as had been speculated at the time,’ Smith said.

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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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