genome

As if pulling a storyline from the movie "Jurassic Park," a Harvard University professor says it would be possible to clone the long-extinct Neanderthal. One little hitch is that he'd need a woman willing to carry the offspring.

Contrary to a flurry of headlines following his interview with German magazine Der Spiegel, however, Harvard molecular geneticist George Church is not currently taking applications from would-be surrogate moms.

"The real story here is how these stories have percolated and changed in different ways," Church, a well-respected genetics professor at Harvard Medical School, told the Boston Herald following a slew of recent impossible-to-ignore headlines such as "I can create Neanderthal baby, I just need willing woman," and, from the Daily Mail, "Wanted: 'Adventurous woman' to give birth to Neanderthal man - Harvard professor seeks mother for cloned cave baby." … Read more

With the success of companies like Tumblr, Foursquare, and Kickstarter, New York's startup scene has gotten a lot of attention recently.

But despite the influence of those outfits and venture capitalists like Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson, the Big Apple is a backwater when it comes to the world startup scene, according to a new report from the Startup Genome project.

In the study, New York City came in as just the fifth-ranked startup ecosystem in the world, trailing Silicon Valley, Israel's Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and Seattle.

To come up with its rankings, the Startup Genome -- … Read more

"Made in USA." That's a designation that President Barack Obama and dozens of American companies, universities, and research labs want to apply to a new generation of high-tech materials, the White House said today.

As part of its Materials Genome Initiative, the Obama administration and partners in business, academia, and national labs are pushing the fast and efficient development and utliization of a wide range of new advanced, American-made materials. The goal is to cut the time it takes to discover, develop, and deploy these new materials in half, the White House said.

The theory behind the … Read more

Yahoo today announced Genome, a data-intensive advertising system designed to help marketers navigate the wilds of the "big data landscape" on the way to more precise ad targeting and personalization.

Genome is designed to pull together Yahoo data with third-party data from Interclick and first-party data from advertisers, while also making sense of heaps and heaps of less-structured information. It's all about helping marketers tame what Yahoo terms "the chaos of the data ecosystem" in order to build brand value, boost conversion rates, and elevate revenue.

"With Genome, we can help marketers transform consumer … Read more

At CES, scientific-equipment giant Life Technologies unveiled a DNA sequencer designed to decode an entire human genome in a day for $1,000 by the end of 2012.

The Ion Proton Sequencer, priced at $149,000, isn't your typical hot commodity on the show floor. But the benchtop sequencer costs far less than its bulkier, slower predecessors (typically in the $500,000 to $750,000 range), and the $1,000 price tag--once costs fall to that level--could put personal gene sequencing directly into the hands of the masses.

"This is such an amazing moment in history," said … Read more

It's been a good year for video gamers--and not just the epic legions of Call of Duty fans enjoying Modern Warfare 3.

A few months after Foldit players helped decode the structure of a protein key to the way HIV multiplies, another group of gamers taking on DNA sequencing in the game Phylo have contributed more than 350,000 solutions, the game's designers at McGill University report.

When University of Washington researchers unveiled Foldit in 2008, it wasn't clear whether the protein-folding game would be a one hit wonder. But one-year-old Phylo, already averaging 1,000 eureka … Read more

What does it take to make it to 100 years old? The Archon Genomics X Prize hopes to find out.

As I've researched "extreme" aging in recent years--that is, the genes and lifestyles of centenarians (100 and older) and supercentenarians (110 and older)--a common refrain I hear from my younger peers is, "I don't want to get that old. It sounds miserable."

Whether or not that's true is something most of us will never find out. The reality is that those who make it past 100 are an exceedingly rare breed of … Read more

You wouldn't know it by looking at it, but the naked mole-rat has a few things to teach the animal world. It has fascinated researchers since it was discovered a few years ago that the rodents can live for 30 years, compared to the mouse's average life span of four.

So after launching an online database that details the lives and histories of more than 4,000 animal species, a consortium of researchers from around the world set out to sequence the genome of the naked mole-rate--which is native to the deserts of East Africa.

With the help … Read more

A new saliva test developed by geneticists at the University of California, Los Angeles, reveals a person's age within five years, a finding that could have many applications in medicine, at crime scenes, and more.

"With just a saliva sample, we can accurately predict a person's age without knowing anything else about them," says principal investigator Dr. Eric Vilain, a professor of human genetics, pediatrics and urology, in a UCLA news release.

The team's research, published online this week in the Public Library of Science's PLoS One journal, focuses on methylation, a process by … Read more