If I get my DNA sequenced at 23andMe or DecodeMe, what information do I get? Is my privacy safe?

If my parents do it too, will it tell me where recombination happened in each chromosome? Btw, does anyone know of a visualization of the chromosomes showing some genes (and corresponding phenotypes)?

Kinda like this but more general-purpose and for ( Read more... )

cavewomen, talking to each other:

A- Look at his head, he must be at least 30!
B- OMG! To have lived that long, he must have really good genes.
A- I saw him first!

A- Why do peacocks have huge tails?
B- Because peahens find them attractive.
A- and why do they?
B- because it's a handicap: any peacock that survives with such a ridiculously long tail must be pretty fit otherwise. His genes must be good ( Read more... )

from Wikipedia: Liger
It is believed that this is because female lions transmit a growth-inhibiting gene to their descendants to balance the growth-promoting gene transmitted by male lions. (This gene is due to competitive mating strategies in lions.) A male lion needs to be large to successfully defend the pride from other roaming male lions and ( Read more... )

I've been analyzing more evolution stuff, inspired by tdj. Maybe I'm going a bit overboard (I probably misinterpreted the original meaning, but such speculations are fascinating anyway)

In response to Study reveals a way disease bacteria sense antimicrobials and initiate a counter-defense:
Many living things, from fruit flies to people, naturally ( Read more... )

It looks like malaria somehow makes its host more delicious to mosquitoes, via tdj
Mosquitoes are more attracted to people already infected with malaria. And this appears to be because the malarial parasite orchestrates its own onward transmission from within the human body, a new study suggests ( Read more... )

thread at tdj's about carbon-dating individual human cells (it's a very clever idea):

In discussing the required experimental precision / error, I proposed:
Here's a causation network ( Read more... )