In the summer of 1981, a Swedish graduate student named Svante Paabo filled a laboratory at the University of Uppsala with the stench of rotting liver. Paabo was supposed to be studying viruses, but he had become secretly obsessed with a more exotic line of research: extracting DNA from Egyptian mummies. No one at the time had any idea if the desiccated flesh of pharaohs still contained any genetic material, so Paabo decided to run an experiment. He bought a piece of calf’s liver and put it in a lab oven at about 120 degrees for a few days to approximate mummification. In the dried, blackened lump of meat, he succeeded in finding scattered fragments of DNA.

Continue reading “Missing Links” →

Imagine you’re a looking for a place to shoot a monster movie. The plot involves animals kept in suspended animation for seven centuries springing back to life. Chances are you wouldn’t pick South Center Lake for your location. The charming 898-acre lake sits on the outskirts of the small town of Lindstrom, Minn., known as America’s Little Sweden. Gothic it’s not.

But in real life, South Center Lake has become the setting for a remarkable resurrection. Scientists have revived shrimp-like animals that have been buried at the bottom of the lake for an estimated 700 years. If this estimate holds up to further testing, they are the oldest animals ever resurrected.

Continue reading “A Living Time Capsule Shows the Human Mark on Evolution” →

Scientists have extracted the entire genome of a 130,000-year-old Neanderthal from a single toe bone in a Siberian cave, an accomplishment that far outstrips any previous work on Neanderthal genes.

The accuracy of the new genome is of similar quality to what scientists would achieve if they were sequencing the DNA of a living person.

“It’s an amazing technical accomplishment,” said Sarah A. Tishkoff, an expert on human evolution at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the research. “Twenty years ago, I would have thought this would never be possible.”

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In 1961, two biologists named Leonard Hayflick and Paul Moorehead discovered that old age is built into our cells. At the time, many scientists believed that if healthy human cells were put in a flask with a steady supply of nutrients, they would multiply forever. But when Dr. Hayflick and Dr. Moorehead reared fetal human cells, that’s not what they found. Time and again, their cells would divide about 50 times and then simply stop.

Cells that stop growing this way came to be known as senescent.

Continue reading “Signs of Aging, Even in the Embryo” →