Category Archives: Transhuman News

Hey guys! Been a bit since I last wrote a news post. First things first; the About page is finally up and ready to go! I talk a little bit about the comic and how it's made, and there are a whole bunch of character profiles to look at of everybody who's appeared in DNA thus far as well! Go take a look at that here!

Secondly: My day job.

As you may (or may not) know, I also draw another comic professionally. This one's not a webcomic and I had no hand in the writing whatsoever; it's a physical, for-sale-in-an-actual-comic-book-shop kind of book. I was hired to do four issues of this other title, and I'm going to have number four finished within these next two months. As soon as that's done and I get paid, that's it, I'm done working for that company, and I'm jobless. This is just how freelancing works.

That, of course, brings me to Patreon.

Storytelling is my passion, and what I feel I'm best at. DNA in particular I've been building and rebuilding for the last 10 years or so, trying to make something as sincere and as good as I'm capable of. Pouring myself into this comic has quite literally saved my life a couple times, and I'm in a position now where I can actually work on it some and throw it out into the world, hopefully to do some good for someone else out there who feels broken, alone, and lost.

I want creating DNA (and, eventually, other comics!) to be my job, but the problem is, I can't do that if I'm not being paid like that's what it is. I don't have time for that; I have three cats, a dog, and a spouse to feed (and they all eat a lot.) Not to mention, like everybody else my age who went to college, I've got a good chunk of student loan debt that's not going to just go away.

If you enjoy this comic and want it to update more often (up to 8 times per month is what I want!), pledging to Patreon is the only way to make that happen. Everybody tells me that it's more than worth it, and with more money coming in, I'm only going to do more stuff for you guys to look at, like speedpaint videos! And other cool things, like hiring guest artists, and going to conventions! Heck, I want my own website; I've outgrown Smackjeeves. Some of the workarounds I have to do to make my website work are downright silly (I needed to edit this blog post down quite a bit since it broke my homepage due to being too long.)

I can only make these things happen if you guys help me out, so please become a patron. You will literally be changing my life, and it will not be money wasted. I have a lot of things I want to do, and with you guys backing me, I'll be able to do them.

Check out my patreon here!

Thank you for your time!

Continued here:
Home - DNA

Education and Technology:

Microsoft Learning Tools is software that helps improve reading skills by reducing visual crowding, highlighting words, and reading text aloud, so students can engage with words in a whole new way.

Again?

It was no secret thatSteve Park was adopted.He couldnt remember a time when he didnt knowthe whole story, which started in1946 when his adopted parents took him in. Merril and Arthur Parka big-time Hollywood agent who at one time repped Ronald Reaganraised him in Brentwood; his sister was presented at cotillion. It was a formal household, he recalls. You had to be properly dressed to go to dinner. Parks mother had always told him and his sister, You kids dont know how lucky how you were, you were hand-picked. He liked to imagine someone going to the grocery store and squeezing the melons, choosing just the right ones.

Parkhad long operated under the assumption that hed lived a decent lifea great one, reallyand though he was curious at times, hed never exactly felt a burning desire to track down his birth family. That is, untilhisbest friend and fellow church organist Alice Rucker caught the genealogy bug.While drafting up her family tree, she started pestering him to send in a DNA test so he could figure out his lineage. After all, there were at least a few mysteries about his genes in need of unraveling, including that at age 70, he easily passed for 50.

Even though Rucker was pushing me, I sort of had made up my mind that I was never going to find anyone, he says. I really didnt care. His adopted parents were his family, and he felt that if his birth parents wanted him to know about them, theyd have made themselves available. And digging into potentially sealed adoption records, which vary state to state, didnt seem worth it.

But after his adopted mother passed away in 2015, Rucker handed him a DNA test from 23andMe. Park immediately tossed it in a drawer, but after a few months, shefinally worehim down: He swabbed his cheek and mailed off the sample. Yet whenthe results arrived, they didnt reveal a singleclose relative. So he dropped it.

Rucker didnt, though. She bought him another testa test tube he was supposed to fill with saliva and send to AncestryDNA. He followed through this time, and it paid off. AncestryDNA had unconvered some potential relative matches and sent him a list of names. Rucker took on the case, hunting down contact information and emailing until she reached a matched woman in Indiana and another in Carlsbad, California.

After months of back and forth, the womenMarylou Chilton, 72, and her elderly mother Margaret Wood, then 90agreed to meet up with Park and Rucker in a neutral space last fall. When the two friends pulled into the parking lot of a fish restaurant in Carlsbad, California, Park spotted his missing family members immediately, rushing across the parking lot and into his birth mothers arms before even introducing himself.

Over a lunch that lasted nearly four hours, the story came tumbling out. Steves birth mother, Margaret, married young in 1944, had a baby, and became a war widowall before the age of 20. After her high school sweetheart returned from the war, they reconnected and she got pregnant again, and when the pregnancy started to show, her parents shipped her off to an aunt in Riverside, California. In those days, you just didnt get pregnant out of wedlock, explains Park.

As a single parent of a 2-year-old daughter and without a job in a strange city, Margaret had few options other than adoption. She told him that just before giving birth, her nurse told her, The best thing to do is to not even see your son.

Margaret never stopped wondering what happened to that little baby. And now she got to see the baby she said goodbye to in the hospital. Steve finally learned why people assume hes 20 years younger than his age. Its from my mother; she is sharp as a tack, and she is the designated driver for all her friends.

At the restaurant table, Rucker pulled up the genealogical tree shed built for Steve. He got up to see it, leaning in between his half sister and his mother, and watched a tear slip down Margarets cheek. After the meeting, the two kept in touch over email. They werent sure what to call each other, but settled on BM for birth mother, and BS for birth son.

Marylou Chilton, Margaret Wood, and Steve Park.

CeCe Moore, a professional musician turned genetic genealogist, hears stories like Parks all the time. Moore was always interested in biology, and when autosomal DNA tests started becoming popular in 2009, she convinced 40 members of her family to take them and started writing a blog about what they found.

That experience drove her to create DNA Detectives, an Orange County-based company, in 2010. She has consulted on cases like Benjamin Kyles, an amnesiac found slumped over at a Burger King in Georgia. She also has worked pro bono to help adoptees find their relatives. These days, the demand is too great, so she started a Facebook group where people help each other solve personal genetic mysteries. That group now has more than 46,000 membersand its where Rucker started hunting for clues to Steves parentage.

Moore says it isnt exactly rocket science. Three different companies (23andMe, AncestryDNA, and Family Tree DNA) offer DNA tests, each costing about $100. Many users prefer to keep their tests private, perhaps because theyre taking a paternity test that may have sensitive results, or maybe did it on a lark. But for those who want to really explore into their family history, adding tests to the public database can lead to new information.

Its possible to really game the system by taking multiple tests, connecting their various genetic databases to a wide net of potential links. Ancestry.coms database alone holds information about 3 million people, which means most users will be able to find some sort of relative, says Moore. Even distant relatives arent impossible to find: Second cousins share 3 percent of their DNA (which is sampled by testing companies at more than 700,000 locations along a genome). When you connect a genetic profile to the name of a person (sometimes with contact information attached) who has a really fleshed-out treeperhaps because they have a well-intentioned nagging presence in their life, not unlike Ruckerit can be easier to fill in your own tree, Moore says.

Sometimes the results can really shake up a familys perception. Studies show that around 10 percent of people have a biological father who is not the one who raised them. But when people whove already fleshed out their genealogical tree (down to their second cousin twice removed) take genetic tests, it can help everyone. I think in the next two to three years, the vast majority of adoptees will be able to test and get immediate answers, she says. A lot of long-standing mysteries will be answered.

Mary Becker Cunningham, 56, Attica, New York had one of those mysteries. Like Park, she was adopted, but didnt necessarily want to track any family members down. But she did want to discover her heritage. So she took a genetic test from AncestryDNA.

She received the results last Thanksgiving night, and she burst into tears when she saw that she had matched as a first cousin with someone in the system. After that, I dont think I left the house for a couple weeks, she says. She wrote to everyone she could find on the list of potential relatives, telling them who she was.

She saw CeCe Moore talking about genetic genealogy on television and joined the DNA Detectives Facebook group, where she got advice on how to draw up potential family trees and test their validity. With the help of the group, Cunningham narrowed down her potential relatives and discovered a first cousin. That cousin reached out to another woman, Cunninghams older half sister. She sent Cunningham a text that read, We always knew about you and we have looked for you our entire life.

Mary Becker Cunningham with her birth mother.

The next day she hopped on a conference call with her birth mother, who had conceived Cunningham while working as a nanny for a man who ran a trucking business (Cunningham says she doesnt know if her birth father ever knew about her), and one of her half sisters. After putting Cunningham up for adoption, her mother moved out of New York and down to Florida.

In a striking coincidence, Cunninghams birth mother now lives just 10 miles away from Cunninghams daughter in Florida. She drove to Florida last month and met her birth mother and two half-sisters in person. Its so strange, but we talk the same, says Cunningham, who adds that it feels like theyve known each other their whole lives. I did a lot of crying before and after, but when we were talking, we were mostly just laughing. I love them, and they love me.

Park experienced a similar emotion when he got into the car after that long lunch in Carlsbad. It was evening by the time he turned to Rucker and said with a big sigh, My life is now complete. It really was. Like, wow, I now know where I came from.

Illustration by Stephanie Kubo

Imagevia GIPHY

The rest is here:
DNA Detectives Can Help Track Down The Family You Never Knew You'd Lost - GOOD Magazine

Alexandra Berumen thought she was European and Mexican. Wrong.

Serena Pierce thought she was Italian and German. Wrong.

Deitrick Stogner thought he was African-American. Partly wrong.

They and two other after-school program participants at LeMoyne Community Center Kaprice Johnson and Daisean Lacks submitted to DNA testing to determine their true ethnic makeup. They tested through ancestry.com and africanancestry.com in January, and four youngsters were surprised by the DNA results. One remains puzzled.

No one is one thing. Were all a hodgepodge of many things, Joyce Ellis, executive director of the center, told a group of about 30 youngsters Thursday. They gathered in a room inside the East Washington center to watch a video related to the quintets quest to find out as Ellis put it Who do you think you are?

Videographer Allen Bankz posed that question in January, after the five test subjects submitted saliva samples as DNA evidence. One by one, from behind his camera, he asked them what they believed their genealogies to be and recorded their responses. The interesting part would come later, when the results arrived and the kids would read them for the first time for a second filming.

The comparison of perception and reality promised to be interesting.

The results, though, came back later than Ellis expected. She was hoping to have them in time for the centers annual Black History Month celebration at the end of February, but the only ones to arrive by then were for Kaprice and for Ellis, who likewise wanted to be tested. The other results came in only recently.

Thursday afternoon, Alexandra and Serena were the only kids who did not know their true ancestries. Bankz was poised to film them a second time. The girls certainly werent prepared for the results.

Alexandra, whose father owns Las Palmas, a Hispanic grocery in Washington, found out she is 57 percent American Indian and 36 percent European.

Surprised? Ellis asked, smiling.

Mostly, said Alexandra, who looked mostly astonished.

Serena knew one great-grandmother was from Italy and that she had relatives from Germany and Ireland, but was semi-stunned to see she was 52 percent Irish, 15 percent Scandinavian and only 8 percent Italian.

Deitrick considers himself to be an African-American teen with a heavy concentration of relatives in the Chicago area. He also has a grandmother who is partly American Indian. But he is more European (52 percent) than African (43 percent), with a mix of many nations.

I had no idea I was that much of a mix, he said.

Daisean has an interesting ancestral link. He is a descendant of Henrietta Lacks, who has gained renown as an unwitting contributor to amazing medical advances. Before she died of cervical cancer in 1951, at age 31, doctors removed two cervical samples without telling her. Henriettas HeLa cells have been multiplied and used in a number of biomedical research procedures, and were instrumental in Jonas Salks development of the polio vaccine.

In January, Daisean said his father is African-American, his mother is white and his family is mostly from Pittsburgh. He eventually discovered he is 33 percent Ivory Coast of Ghana, 21 percent Nigerian and 13 percent European. He was the only test subject who was not on hand for the DNA program Thursday.

Kaprice received her report more than two months ago and still considers it to be vague. She was told she has a gene that traces back about 15,000 years, and has a European background without a breakdown of that background. Kaprice said a number of family members have hailed from around Carnegie and Pittsburgh, and that her mother is Irish with red hair.

Ellis also was surprised at her results, She said she is 36 percent European, with elements of France, Germany, England, Italy and Ireland nations she, coincidentally, has visited. Ellis said she also is 24 percent West African descent.

Im zero percent native American Indian, which I thought might be the highest (percentage), Ellis added.

Yet she wasnt totally surprised. When it comes to ancestry, the LeMoyne Center director realizes anything is possible.

Skin tone is no matter, she told her young audience Thursday. Its what the DNA says.

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DNA tests tell LeMoyne Center youth who they are - Observer-Reporter

kfor.com

Nichols Hills police: Thirsty thieves left behind DNA evidence at burglary scenes kfor.com Detective Lt. Michael Puckett sent the Sprite Zero bottle to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation for DNA analysis. Recently, OSBI notified Nichols Hills police that the DNA profile on the soda matched 38-year-old Jared Kesner, a convicted felon.

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Nichols Hills police: Thirsty thieves left behind DNA evidence at burglary scenes - kfor.com

Knowledge of DNA repair mechanisms advances with new research Science Daily DNA can be damaged by a range of normal cellular activities, not to mention ultraviolet light and ionizing radiation. The bad news is that damage, such as DNA double-strand breaks, is constantly occurring. But the good news is the human body has so ...

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Knowledge of DNA repair mechanisms advances with new research - Science Daily

WFLA

What a DNA test can teach you about your diet WFLA (WFLA) You can map out your family tree, solve ancient mysteries, even predict your future, but did you know your DNA can also tell you what to eat? There's a new trend in feeling better and slimming downall by knowing what your body really needs ...

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What a DNA test can teach you about your diet - WFLA

Sixth Judicial District Judge Mark Munger said the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension crime lab can conduct forensic tests on five DNA swabs obtained from a handgun and ammunition recovered in the investigation of February's fatal shooting of 22-year-old William Andrew Grahek.

Munger overruled objections from attorneys for the five suspects charged in connection with Grahek's death, who took issue with the BCA's declaration that the tests are likely to consume the entirety of the samples making it impossible for the defendants to request their own evaluations.

"While there is no dispute that the reliability of DNA testing is critical given the high stakes present in a murder prosecution, obtaining the most accurate results outweighs Defendants' interest in testing lower-quality samples separately," the judge wrote in a nine-page order.

The defense still will be allowed to find an independent expert to be present for testing of the evidence, as required by the Minnesota Rules of Criminal Procedure.

The objection was brought by attorneys for 21-year-old Deandre Demetrius Davenport, who is accused of shooting Grahek twice during an attempted armed robbery of cash and drugs at Grahek's East Hillside residence on Feb. 14.

Attorneys for four co-defendants Noah Anthony Charles King, 18; Noah Duane Baker, 19; Tara Rai Baker, 22; and Xavier Alfred Haywood, 26 also joined in the motion.

St. Louis County prosecutors Jessica Fralich and Vicky Wanta informed the court that there are five swabs at issue two from live rounds and two from spent rounds found at the scene, as well as one sample from the trigger of the suspected murder weapon.

They said the 9mm Glock pistol was recovered from a person with "connections to Mr. Davenport and Mr. Davenport's family" during the execution of a search warrant at a residence in Austin, Minn., where the defendant previously lived.

BCA technicians were able to obtain the five samples but reported that they are "so small that they need to be consumed to get the most accurate result," according to documents filed by the prosecution.

Scott Belfry, a public defender for Davenport, argued at a March hearing that the planned tests amount to "unnecessary destruction of evidence," in violation of the defendants' constitutional rights.

He requested that the defense have access to half of each evidence sample in order to have an outside expert conduct tests.

"The Defendant's ability to conduct reasonable tests on DNA evidence is precluded if the State is allowed to consume the entire DNA sample," Belfry wrote in a brief. "The Rules of Criminal Procedure are designed to allow the defendant to exercise his right to due process and to confront the evidence against him in a reasonable and meaningful manner."

But Fralich and Wanta said the defense's motion posed an "unwarranted intrusion on the State's ability and right to conduct an investigation based on best practices." They said the defense had no legal standing to bring the request and asserted that the testing was being conducted in accordance with the law.

"The reliability of the DNA testing is just as critical to the State as it is to the individual Defendants," the prosecutors wrote. "Obtaining the most accurate result for the State and all of the Defendants must outweigh an individual Defendant's interest in preserving and testing a lower-quality sample."

In his order, Munger noted that judges in several cases across Minnesota have ruled on the relatively new issue of DNA consumption in recent years. He cited testimony from BCA scientists who reported that it is more difficult to establish a DNA profile when only a portion of a small sample is used, as compared to cases where the full swab is consumed.

"Consumption of the evidence would neither run afoul of Defendants' right to due process nor violate the Minnesota Rules of Criminal Procedure," the judge wrote. "The State must be permitted to proceed with testing so long as it does so in strict contemplation of the law. The testing in this case is necessary, appropriate, and must be permitted to proceed."

Munger gave defense attorneys 14 days to identify an expert who will be allowed to be present for the BCA-conducted tests.

The cases remain in their early stages, with all five defendants due back in court on June 30.

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Judge allows DNA tests in Duluth homicide case - Duluth News Tribune

But Lisette de Haan, the lawyer for Karbaat's family, asked the court to respect the Karbaat familys right to privacy and countered: "There is not the slightest evidence that Mr Karbaat was the donor."

Monique Wassenaar, one of the plaintiffs, claims he told her about the possibility he may have fathered children at the clinic himself and that she has this evidence in an email, according to Dutch media reports.

At the request of the families, court officials have already seized personal objects such as a toothbrush from his home. DNA tests on these would be the preferred option, but the court could order a test on one of his legitimate children or call for the body to be exhumed.

"As a mother, this judgement won't give me anything," said Esther Heij, one of the plaintiffs, after the hearing.

"But I see at home how my son's life has been affected. He was so angry when Karbaat died, and that he was taking this to his grave."

On paper, her son and daughter were conceived by the same sperm donor. "Tests are under way, but it's not clear if they really are brother and sister."

Ms Wassenaar, 36, who also attended the hearing, said Karbaat told her he was proud of his actions: "He [thought he] was in good health and intelligent, so he could share some of his genes with the world," she said. "He saw it as something noble. He had no concept of ethics and minimised the impact on the children.

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Families demand DNA tests on head of Dutch fertility clinic accused of using his own sperm to father children - Telegraph.co.uk