Category Archives: Transhuman News

Dogs may be man's best friend, but their poop can be a pedestrian's worst enemy.

That's why the Fairmont Museum District apartment complex in Houston is taking an innovative step to confront a centuries-old problem.

The 236-unit residence has contracted with PooPrints, a Tennessee company that offers canine DNA testing as a way to track down the person whose dog left a tell-tale turd.

I think it's a great idea, Fairmont leasing manager Molly Kalish said. The main reason we decided to try this new program was because we had a specific issue on one of our floors with accidents.

The building has a large number of dog owners, partly because of its pet-friendly policy and its location adjacent to a city dog park, Kalish said.

So far, Fairmont management has brought up DNA registration with only a small number of dog owners who live on the floor where the accidents occurred.

Others will be asked to sign up as part of the building's pet policy when they renew their leases, Kalish said.

To register a participating tenant's dog, apartment staffers use a kit provided by PooPrints to collect DNA through a cheek swab.

The pet's DNA sample is then sent to PooPrints' laboratory in Tennessee, known as BioPet Vet Lab, PooPrints spokesman Eric Mayer said.

When someone's dog leaves an offending sample of waste on an apartment property, it will be tested for a potential match among the complex's registered dogs.

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What dogs left, DNA used against owners

DNA - One Reason (ft.Bizzurke and Joe Gallant)
(prod. Ruler Why Robie Rowland) Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DNAtheG Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/laureate.

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DNA - One Reason (ft.Bizzurke and Joe Gallant) - Video

DNA Predicts O-Red vs Big T to be a SM3 Classic
http://www.vladtv.com/ - Battle Rap journalist Michael Hughes and cameraman Ellis Flynn caught up with DNA at Summer Madness 3 prior to the event starting and the fight that occurred between...

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DNA Predicts O-Red vs Big T to be a SM3 Classic - Video

Scientists have produced a digital image of a genome tens of thousands of years old with the resolution of a typical living person's, enabling them to describe the life of prehistoric humans in great detail, they reported in Thursday's issue of Science magazine.

Led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, the scientists have created the highest-quality genome sequence of prehistoric humans yet.

Therefore, the Denisovans as the group has been called after the Siberian cave harboring its fossils: a finger bone and two teeth are much better known genetically than Neanderthals, although there are hundreds of specimens from them.

There is no difference in what we can learn genetically about a person that lived 50,000 years ago and from a person today, Paabo said Wednesday in a conference call with reporters.

The international team of researchers used only genetic material from a tiny finger bone from a girl that lived in Siberia tens of thousands of years ago. The specimen was found in a cave in 2008 and, based on preliminary genetical analyses by the team in 2010, was attributed to a novel group of humans closely related to Neanderthals.

The scientists owe their insights mainly to new technological advances in sequencing of prehistoric DNA.

All forensics on ancient DNA were originally developed for modern DNA, said Matthias Meyer of the Max Planck Institute, lead author of the article.

He was responsible for developing approaches that take into account challenges typical for prehistoric genetic material, such as its scarcity and degraded state.

Using the DNA, the scientists reconstructed the appearance of the Siberian girl: She had brown eyes and dark hair and skin.

Also from genetic information, the scientists pieced together the girl's pedigree and compared it with that of modern humans and Neanderthals.

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DNA Offers Sharp Image of Prehistoric Humans

After decades of digging, paleoanthropologists say modern humans arose in Africa some 200,000 years ago and all archaic species of humans then disappeared, surviving only outside Africa, as did the Neanderthals in Europe.

Geneticists studying DNA now say that, to the contrary, a previously unknown archaic species of human, a cousin of the Neanderthals, may have lingered in Africa until perhaps 25,000 years ago, coexisting with the modern humans and on occasion interbreeding with them.

The geneticists reached this conclusion, reported on Thursday in the journal Cell, after decoding the entire genome of three isolated hunter-gatherer peoples in Africa, hoping to cast light on the origins of modern human evolution.

But some paleonanthropologists are skeptical because the fossil record has nothing that would support the geneticists' statistical calculations.

The geneticists, led by Joseph Lachance and Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania, decoded the entire genomes of five men each from two Tanzanian tribes and the forest-dwelling pygmies of Cameroon. The genomes of the pygmies and the Tanzanians contained many short stretches of DNA with highly unusual sequences. Through mutation, the genomes of species that once had a common ancestor grow increasingly unlike one another.

Tishkoff's team interprets these divergent DNA sequences as genetic remnants of an interbreeding with an archaic species of human. Genetic calculations suggest the interbreeding took place between 20,000 and 80,000 years ago.

Richard Klein, a paleoanthropologist at Stanford University, said the new claim of archaic and modern human interbreeding is a further example of the tendency for geneticists to ignore fossil and archaeological evidence, perhaps because they think it can always be molded to fit the genetics after the fact.

Tishkoff said she agreed on the need for caution in making statistical inferences, and that there are other events besides interbreeding that can make a single DNA sequence look ancient. But when you see it at a genomewide level, it's harder to explain away, she said.

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DNA and fossils tell differing tales of human origins