Going barefoot in parts of Africa, Asia and South America is dangerous. Hookworms live in the soil and enter the body through the feet. By feeding on victims' blood, the worms cause anemia and, in…

How do we estimate the confidence range about an estimate?  In normal probability theory, we take a distribution and directly measure the dispersion within the data.  This…

Researchers have decoded the whole genome sequence of one widespread species and it turns out to be remarkably big -  6.5 gigabytes, largest animal genome sequenced so far.  The…

The retina can be bombarded by reactive oxygen species in diabetes, prompting events that destroy healthy blood vessels, form leaky new ones and ruin vision, and now researchers have learned that…

Culturally, it's discussed that being a man in the Western world is going out of fashion. People are instead supposed to be homogenized into some sort of gender-neutral swirl of beliefs and actions,…

The Fleckvieh is a breed of cattle that originated in the Alpine region and is now found on every continent, with an estimated worldwide population of around 40 million. Legacy genetic optimization,…

With the rush to legalize marijuana in the interests of a libertarian society or, more suspect, for medical reasons, addiction is about to come back to the forefront. Over 20 million people around…

Scientists may have figured out how the molecular switch for sex gradually and adaptively evolved in the honeybee. It's been a long journey The first genetic mechanism for sex determination was…

If you have been to a tomato farm, you know that commercial tomato plants have a very different look from the backyard garden variety. Rather than being tall and lanky plants, tomatoes that will be…

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four…