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From a 19th-century arsenic test to DNA traced through a public genealogy site, forensic breakthroughs have steadily shifted the weight of criminal cases from testimony to physical proof. But each new tool also brought new debates — about reliability, privacy, and whose DNA ends up in a database without their knowledge.

Using single-molecule physics and biochemical assays, Shaw, Hughes-Games and Torres Montaguth et al. reveal how the bacterial defense enzyme SauUSI repeatedly scans and makes multiple DNA breaks, efficiently fragmenting invading genetic material.

The extraordinary intelligence of octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish may be linked to more than just their genes.

The extraordinary intelligence of octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish may be linked to more than just their genes.

Somewhere in the African grasslands, a tiny bird is preparing an elaborate fraud. The cuckoo finch doesn’t build a nest or raise its own chicks. Instead, it sneaks an egg into another bird’s nest, leaving the unsuspecting parents to do the hard work. But in order for this to work, the egg must look convincing enough to escape detection. Over generations, female cuckoo finches have become remarkable counterfeiters, producing eggs that closely resemble those of their chosen hosts. Some are blue, others reddish, and many carry distinctive speckles and markings. But as it turns out, they’re starting to pay a genetic price for it. A counterfeit egg factory The African cuckoo finch (Anomalospiza imberbis) is a brood parasite. It’s not related to the more familiar common cuckoo, but it shares the similar practice of exploiting the parental instincts of other birds. Most commonly, it targets, small African songbirds called prinias and cisticolas. These birds have spent many generations evolving ways to recognize foreign eggs in their nests. Some even lay eggs with distinctive colours and markings which act like individual signatures. This triggered an arms rage (or rather, an eggs race) where the cuckoo finch responds with increasingly convincing imitations...

Μία υπόθεση δολοφονίας που παρέμενε ανεξιχνίαστη για 52 χρόνια στις ΗΠΑ εξιχνιάστηκε χάρη σε σύγχρονες τεχνικές DNA. Οι αρχές της Γιούτα συνέδεσαν τον κατά συρροή δολοφόνο Τεντ Μπάντι με τον θάνατο της 17χρονης Μελίσα Αν Σμιθ το 1974. Σύμφωνα με το BBC, η Μελίσα Αν Σμιθ, κόρη ενός τοπικού αρχηγού της αστυνομίας στη Γιούτα των […]

DNA from more than 3,000 barn owls reveals natural selection at work, but the advantage behind their changing feathers may involve coping with stress rather than color itself. Swiss barn owls have become more reddish-brown and more heavily spotted over the past 30 years. By tracking the DNA variants linked to their plumage, researchers have found evidence of natural selection acting over about ten generations, offering a detailed view of evolution unfolding in the wild. The study, published in Nature Communications, was led by Dr. Tristan Cumer, a research fellow in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Lausanne (Unil)’s Faculty of Biology and Medicine. Working in Professor Jérôme Goudet’s team, Cumer and his colleagues examined how genetic variants associated with color and spotting became more or less common over time. The challenge was to distinguish changes that could occur randomly from those shaped by natural selection. “We compared the changes observed in the population with simulations in which evolution was entirely random. A genetic variant associated with reddish-brown plumage became far more common than chance alone could explain. Only simulations that included natural selection reproduced the changes we observed,” explains Cumer, the paper’s first author. Redder...