By David Wilson, Technical University of Braunschweig
I’ve been an ecologist in Australia for the last ten years, working for both government agencies and as a university researcher. Over this time, funding for fieldwork has been increasingly hard to secure…
Technical, financial and legal barriers stop the sharing of vital information in medical research.
Frans de Waal/ Wikimedia Commons
A paper published today in Science Translational Medicine calls for the open sharing of clinical trial data among the medical research community. Researchers argue data sharing would lead to faster, more…
A whole genome test is meaningless unless you can interpret it.
Dave Faryam
By Rony Duncan, Murdoch Childrens Research Institute and Martin Delatycki, Murdoch Childrens Research Institute
It’s now possible to access genetic testing from your living room or office, without the need to visit a health professional.
There are many reasons why you might like to get a genetic test. Maybe someone…
Lack of genetic diversity makes it hard for island-bound species to survive when threats arrive.
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery
We have all heard at some time or another that Australia has the worst record of mammal extinctions in history, with many of our unique and vulnerable critters succumbing only years after the first Europeans…
The Red Deer Cave people and humans could be part of different evolutionary lines.
Peter Schouten
The origin of the human species remains one of the most fascinating and difficult topics of modern science.
One of the main reasons for this is a continuing lack of agreement about how we should define…
The demise of the woolly mammoth could teach us much about our effect on other species.
George Teichmann
When we think of the last 50,000 years of prehistory, particularly the “Ice Age”, extinct species such as the woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros often spring to mind.
Did humans bring about the extinction…
Landscape is the star in The Hunter, but science plays a respectable supporting role.
Matthew Nettheim
All over the planet, a new wave of exploration and exploitation is taking place. Bioprospectors are searching for new and useful biological samples and compounds from previously unstudied animals and plants…
We may have pinpointed the event that started modern Y. pestis epidemics.
Steam Pirate.
Could contemporary plague outbreaks such as those that have hit Peru and the USA have their origins in the medieval era? It would seem so.
A paper published in Nature today reports a genome sequence taken…
So what's it to be, buddy, my cave or yours?
Kaptain Kobold
We humans had sex with Neandertals; we bonked the relatives of Neandertals; we got down and dirty with members of an as-yet unrecognised African population; and we, of course, got jiggy with each other…
GM is not being used to make fishbread Frankenfoods.
Dave Lifson/Flickr
The Conversation asked CSIRO scientist, Richard Richards, to look at the top five myths about genetic modification (GM), and correct the public record.
Myth one: GM is just haphazard, imprecise cross…
The man behind the mask. Ned Kelly's skeleton can finally be laid to rest.
the euskadi 11
By Dadna Hartman, Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine
The remains of iconic bushranger Ned Kelly have been positively identified by forensic scientists more than a century after his hanging in 1880.
The identification was made after an exhaustive forensic…
A US court has recognised Myriad Genetics' patent for an isolated gene, which plays a role in breast cancer.
Mel Rowling
The recent US Federal Court of Appeals decision relates to the patent law status of inventions based on the discovery that particular mutations in BRCA genes predispose women to breast and ovarian cancer…
Understanding DNA is vital to developing our knowledge of complex diseases.
DNA Art Online
Imagine taking a thousand copies of a phone book, shredding them all together, then trying to use the overlapping pieces to reconstruct a copy.
This is a simple problem compared to assembling the human…
Animals aren't to blame – the bacteria came from humans.
The genomes of the recent German E. coli outbreak have revealed crucial insights into the origins of this deadly strain. The bacteria was found in German bean sprouts but it didn’t originate from the gut…
Try as you might, there's no proof you can control your genetic expression.
mutsmuts/Flickr
Can the way we think influence the way we feel? Most of us would say yes. But can thinking affect the way our bodies behave on a genetic level? Can we, in essence, think ourselves better? A growing band…
