As the swine flu sweeps through schools and households across the state, many folks feel as if hand washing now rivals time spent playing outside. ...more

October 22, 2009

It may not be the most attractive or appealing definition, but in its strictest scientific sense, life is a common, sexually transmitted, medical condition with 100 percent mortality. At the time we are conceived, we are all programmed to die. Human life is being transmitted through "genes" the same way, since its creation. How well and how long each one of us lives is essentially decided by the genes, if we let nature take its course. ...more

January 11, 2009

Taking a big hop forward in marsupial research, scientists say they have unraveled the DNA of a small kangaroo named Matilda. ...more

November 19, 2008

For the first time, researchers have decoded all the genes of a person with cancer and found a set of mutations that may have caused the disease or aided its progression. ...more

November 6, 2008

George Church wants to put his personal genetic blueprint online for all to see - the sequence of chemical bases that make him who he is, a lanky scientist of Scottish ancestry who has dyslexia, narcolepsy and motion sickness. ...more

October 20, 2008

Countering the prevailing theory that aging is the accumulation of wear and tear in cells, scientists studying worms have found that aging might be hard-wired, a sort of unintentional sabotage by genes gone wild. ...more

July 26, 2008

New research suggests that some cases of autism arise from defects in genes that can be turned on or off by mental activity, a finding that sheds light on the devastating condition and might eventually lead to strategies to treat it. ...more

July 11, 2008

A Pasco High football player with a familiar name and familiar talent is about to emerge, if the spring was any indication of what can be expected from soon-to-be sophomore Jamie Byrd. ...more

June 3, 2008

Remember biology class where you learned that children inherit one copy of a gene from mom and a second from dad? There's a twist: Some of those genes arrive switched off, so there is no backup if the other copy goes bad, making you more vulnerable to disorders from obesity to cancer. ...more

December 14, 2007

Researchers say they have discovered a major reason why women who inherit a mutated version of the gene BRCA1 run a high risk of breast cancer - and that finding might aid the search for new treatments. ...more

December 10, 2007