Portside

Obesity is one of the biggest public health challenges of the 21st century, affecting more than 500 million people worldwide and costing at least $200 billion each year in the United States alone. It contributes to cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer. Scientists have now uncovered a genetic circuit that controls whether our bodies burn or store fat. Manipulating that genetic circuit may offer a new approach for obesity treatments.

Until recently, [some] specimens have been un-sequenceable due to DNA contamination from the modern people who have handled them. Today’s techniques make it possible to differentiate modern from ancient DNA sequences, which opens up the prospect of returning to the many museum specimens in collections worldwide to see what further answers they might hold.

Exercise, a new study finds, changes the shape and functioning of our genes, an important stop on the way to improved health and fitness. More than 5,000 sites on the genome of muscle cells are altered by exercise.

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Perhaps unwittingly, perhaps deliberately, Wade has blurred "the distinction between storytelling and science," writes Eisen. The blurring of that line is infecting scientific discussions that have great public implications--it's visible, for example, in the political attack on climate science, the promotion of creationism, and the marketing of California's multibillion-dollar stem cell program.

Time and again, data that refutes Nicholas Wade's arguments in A Troublesome Inheritance is not only available and widely cited in the population genetics literature—it is often in the text of the papers listed in his endnotes.

When it comes to our immune response, genetics takes a back seat to pathogens.

The oldest known genome of a modern human solves long-standing puzzles about the New World's genetic heritage.

There is a huge disparity between what scientists and genetics professionals know and what the general public understands about breakthroughs in the field of genetics and the ethical problems it presents. To address this disparity students at the University of San Diego have created a website to educate the public and bridge the gap between scientific literature and the general public.