Genes make us who we are—but are they shaped by chance, natural selection, or something else?

Each of us tells a story about who we are, often tracing our identity back through an imagined line of ancestors. Though identity is fundamentally cultural, we tend to anchor it in biology—in the idea ...

An ancestral human species faced a startling population bottleneck and teetered on the brink of extinction around 800,000 years ago, according to new research. Reading time 3 minutes Humankind ...

Most of us think of potatoes as a side dish, something humble and starchy that fills the plate around whatever else is ...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will establish an ad hoc committee to conduct a study to review and assess existing methodologies, benefits, and challenges in the use of ...

Philip Awadalla has been studying population genetics for decades, and is still amazed at what scientists have learned from comparing genomes at scale. “There have been massive advancements in our ...

Emmanuel Paradis is senior researcher in the French Institute of Research for Development (IRD). His research focuses on evolutionary models and their applications. The development and publication of ...

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) was developed at the turn of the millennium, and the first complete sequence of the human genome was achieved in 2022. Recent technological developments now allow us ...

A common gene pool unites GCC countries. Borders keep the data apart. Sharing it could lead to significant public health ...