The headline figure of lifespan being around “50% heritable” risks being misunderstood as meaning genes determine half of a ...

When a random worker honeybee is selected to become a queen, she is nothing special. But after dining on royal jelly, she doubles in size to become a queen capable of giving birth to a thousand bees ...

Most genes are ancient and shared across species. But a small subset of genes are relative newcomers, spontaneously emerging from stretches of DNA that once encoded nothing at all. Now, after nearly a ...

Thanks to increasingly efficient and affordable gene sequencing technologies, we can now chart our genetic blueprint in unprecedented detail. But what does each gene do? Of the roughly 20,000 genes ...

When a baby takes their first step unaided, it is a big moment for parents and their baby. After all, it symbolises a new phase in a child’s life. They officially, and literally, become a ‘toddler.’ ...

For decades, geneticists have known that most common illnesses are not caused by a single rogue gene but by intricate constellations of DNA variants acting together in specific cells. Now a new ...

Genome-wide association studies and rare-variant burden tests are the two main tools for discovering links between genetic variants and traits. Comparisons of their results reveal that they ...

Dr. Conley is the author of “The Social Genome: The New Science of Nature and Nurture.” Since Francis Galton coined the phrase “nature versus nurture” 150 years ago, the debate about what makes us who ...