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Privacy is dead!

Privacy is dead!

Privacy is dead. It never existed online, but even more importantly modern genetics has destroyed any sense of privacy. With millions of people in online databases, and with many of those accessible to the public, almost everybody is essentially identifiable....
Twisting Tales with Ancient DNA

Twisting Tales with Ancient DNA

  The fact that ancient DNA exists at all is a minor miracle. And now that we have figured out how to extract it efficiently and sequence it accurately (more or less), we are suddenly able to answer many long-standing historical riddles. Dr C explains how ancient...
The Mystery of Personal Ancestry

The Mystery of Personal Ancestry

The things we can now learn about ourselves, and our recent history, through ancestry testing are simply amazing. Revisiting the SNP chip used by Ancestry.com and 23andMe.com, 4-grandparent test, amazing geographic specificity, no you do not have thousands of...
The Mystery of DNA Sequencing

The Mystery of DNA Sequencing

Dr C explains how to sequence DNA, how to build a genome, and how Ancestry and 23andMe work their magic. Bacterial polymerases do all the work for us, PCR and DNA sequencing, the genome, shotgun sequencing, example: shotgunning the Bible, size of the genome vs a book...
The Mystery of Human Ancestry

The Mystery of Human Ancestry

  Old ideas about where babies come from, blending ancestry, Mendel and the neo-Darwinian synthesis, “Darwinism”, maybe proteins confer ancestry, DNA did not look like anything important, discovery that DNA is the source of ancestry in 1952 via the Hershey-Chase...