Scientists at ETH Zurich in Switzerland have discovered a way to store data on a synthetic "fossil" that they created using DNA.

Produced by Zach Wasser. Video courtesy of Reuters.

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In a letter released to the public on Thursday, the US Department of Agriculture said that it won't regulate a mushroom that has been gene-edited to prevent it from turning brown.

This is widely different from the approach it's taken with GMOs, which are regulated by the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), which keeps an eye on new genetically modified organisms that "may pose a risk to plant health."

The mushroom, developed by Yinong Yang at Penn State, is not the first crop to be modified using the controversial gene-editing technique CRISPR-Cas9, but it is the first one that the USDA has said isn't subject to regulation. And that means that everything we know about genetically modified food may be about to change.

At its essence, CRISPR is a far more accurate method of modifying genes than scientists have had access to before.

At the center of the agency's decision not to subject the new crop to its rules is the fact that the CRISPR-edited mushroom doesn't contain any "introduced genetic material" or foreign DNA, and so would not be a threat to other plants.

This is the focus of a lot of the policy surrounding GMOs, or genetically modified organisms. Because GMO crops are tweaked in a lab to contain harmless DNA from other organisms, like bacteria, which help make them more resistant to things like drought or pests, they are regulated by the USDA.

In its letter, the agency says firmly that the CRISPR-edited mushroom doesn't pose a risk to plant health, and so doesn't need to be regulated:

APHIS has no reason to believe that CRISPR/Cas-9-edited white button mushrooms are plant pests. Therefore, consistent with previous responses to similar letters of inquiry, APHIS does not consider CRISPR/Cas-9-edited white button mushrooms ... to be regulated.

A world of CRISPR crops?

This could be the shape of things to come.

"If USDA decides the first product does not require regulation, that would definitely be encouraging for the many people already using CRISPR," Joyce Van Eck, an assistant professor at the Boyce Thompson Institute, told the Genetic Expert News Service.

Many researchers are currently looking into developing CRISPR food products.

Maywa Montenegro wrote for environmental-news site Ensia in January:

Since its 2013 demonstration as a genome editing tool in Arabidopsis and tobacco — two widely used laboratory plants — CRISPR has been road-tested in crops, including wheat, rice, soybeans, potatoes, sorghum, oranges and tomatoes. By the end of 2014, a flood of research into agricultural uses for CRISPR included a spectrum of applications, from boosting crop resistance to pests to reducing the toll of livestock disease.

In other words, this CRISPR crop is probably not going to be the last one we see.

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NOW WATCH: New USDA dietary guidelines have good news for coffee drinkers — and drop breakfast recommendation and cholesterol warnings

Scientific research has proven that some vegetarians can produce omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, because of gene mutation that happened over centuries.

Researchers reported that people with the gene mutation are from a lineage of ancestors whose diet consisted of mostly plants.

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"There’s really no such thing as race," world-famous scientist, author, and television personality Bill Nye told Big Think in 2015. "There’s different tribes but not different races. We’re all one species." 

Despite the fact that there's no scientific basis for the idea of racial differences — a point hammered home by the sequencing of the first human genome, or complete set of DNA, in 2003 — we continue to see ourselves as distinct along racial lines. And these perceptions have real consequences, both in terms of individual behavior and institutional policies.

Scientific research suggests that the vast majority of us are highly aware — consciously or subconsciously — of racial differences and, whether we want it to or not, this knowledge plays a key role in empathy. 

In their 2009 paper in The Journal of Neuroscience, researchers at Peking University did an experiment in which they showed white and Chinese students clips of white and Chinese faces both in pain and not in pain while they measured their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The researchers were paying particular attention to brain activity in an area of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which scientists think plays a key role in registering our own pain and empathy for another person's pain.

For all of the participants, ACC activity was significantly higher while they were viewing painful expressions on the face of someone of their own race, and lower when they viewed pain on the face of another race. The results were in accordance with the hypothesis the researchers started with — that social relationships between individuals influence empathic responses, where an individual experiences higher empathic responses for those in the same perceived social category.

For a 2010 study published in the journal Current Biology, researchers at the Department of Psychology at the University of Bologna conducted a two-part test on groups of white Italians and black Italians. For the first part of the test, they asked the volunteers to match "good" and "bad" words with images of black and white faces. For the second part, they showed the participants images of a black, white, and purple hand being pricked with a needle while they tested neural response to the pain using by stimulating the motor cortex of the brain. The higher the empathic response, the greater the reaction to the stimulation.

Interestingly, while both white and black volunteers showed adequate reaction to the stimulation while they watched the purple hand being pricked, neither groups showed as much activity when they watched a hand of someone outside their racial group being pricked. Additionally, those who tended to match more "good" words with images of people from their own racial group and more "bad" words with another racial group (which suggested what the researchers called implicit racial bias) had even lower neural response while watching a hand of the opposite race being pricked.

No one wants to believe that he or she is racist. However, there is enough conclusive evidence to suggest that the vast majority of us are either consciously or sub-consciously less empathetic toward people of other races. While it is hard to control subliminal responses, a conscious effort to act without bias could be a way to combat the surreptitious racism. Or maybe increased interactions with different 'races' could help our brains see that we are 99.9% the same.

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I am often confounded by the realities of 2016. We have apps that can get you food in minutes, Star Wars films that look more realistic than ever before, and access to the endless expanse of human knowledge that is the World Wide Web. But of all the signals that have forced me to acknowledge that, yes, we are living in the future, few have struck me as hard as 23andMe.

23andMe is a direct-to-consumer genome test service meant to provide its customers with an idea of what their genetic makeup says about them. Named for the 23 pairs of chromosomes in a human cell, 23andMe will take a small sample of your DNA and, from it, create over 60 reports regarding information about your health, your bodily traits, and your ancestry. The company was put on hold for two years after the FDA shut it down out of concerns that consumers might misinterpret results as a diagnosis and attempt to self treat. After making some adjustments, 23andMe came back last fall, this time with support from the FDA.

When I was first assigned the task of covering 23andMe, I was hesitant. Also, I didn’t have many questions about my family history, and any information regarding my potential future health that could be extracted by an analysis of my DNA is information I’d prefer remain unknown. I expressed these concerns to a friend of mine, who immediately said he’d love the chance to get his DNA mapped, so after talking to my editor, it was established that JR would be taking part in the experience.

You can order your own 23andMe kit for $199 here.

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Meet JR

JR has been a friend since middle school. He was interested in 23andMe mostly because he knew very little about his ancestry. “I used to ask my mom about my family; she would just say that we were rednecks,” he said, when I asked him what he knew about his family. “I’ve always hear that I was part Native American, but I don’t have any evidence.”

There are other reasons that people would want to take part in 23andMe; if you are planning on starting a family, there are carrier status reports that could give insight to potential inherited conditions that you could pass on to your children. In JR’s case, though, he was most interested in figuring out something about his heritage, and so we began.

Mailing your kit

The kit is simple enough. It comes in an attractive, brightly colored box that is quite inviting. Inside is a tube for you to spit into and prepaid packaging for its return. First, you must register your kit online to ensure your results get back to you. After that, you’ll spit up to the line in the provided vial (it took JR approximately 4.5 spits), seal it, put it in the return envelope, and drop it in the mail. It’s a super simple process.

About six weeks after mailing in your sample, you’ll get an email letting you know that your results are ready. JR alerted me when he received his email, and we went through his results together. Here were his most important finds while examining his genome map.

You can order your own 23andMe kit for $199 here.

Results 1: Traits

One aspect of 23andMe's genetic mapping is a break down of certain traits you might have: hair color, sneezing in response to sunlight, and preference in taste. With regard to JR, 23andMe got a lot of things right about his looks — light, straight hair and blue eyes — all based on a little vial of his spit. It was impressive. But one trait caught JR's eye more than the others.

“I was really interested to find out I am more likely to consume more caffeine than the average person. It makes a lot of sense.”

JR works as a barista and is a committed coffee drinker. 23andMe knows a lot.

Microsoft is buying 10 million strands of long oligonucleotides — laboratory-made molecules of DNA — from San Francisco startup Twist Bioscience, the companies announced today.

It seems that Microsoft is exploring the idea of using DNA molecules as a way to store massive amounts of data. Unlike hard drives, Blu-Ray discs, or pretty much any current storage technology, DNA stays intact and readable for as long as 1,000 to 10,000 years.

Better yet, Microsoft Research estimates that one cubic millimeter of DNA can store one exabyte, or one billion gigabytes of data. That's important as the rise of the smartphone era means we're generating more photos, video, text, and audio than ever before, making this an important research area for Microsoft.

"As our digital data continues to expand exponentially, we need new methods for long-term, secure data storage," says Microsoft Research's Doug Carmean in the press release.

The technology is a long way away from ready for commercial products, so you won't see a DNA-powered smartphone any time soon. But Microsoft says that the potential is clearly there, and that a test done with Twist Bio last fall went well, with 100% of its data encoded and later retrieved into the test DNA.

Twist Bioscience, which makes synthetic, storage-ready DNA, says in that press release that costs for this technology are getting lower all the time. That means we're not that far away from an era where long-term data storage isn't done on discs or drives, but in strands of customized organic material. Which is good, because current technology is struggling to keep pace.

To pursue that goal, Twist has raised $131 million from investors including Boris Nikolic, one of Bill Gates' chief science advisors at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

And while preserved flies in amber don't actually contain intact DNA like in "Jurassic Park," — fossilized tree is great for preserving insect skeletons, but not their DNA — it's still a useful way to think about the potential of the technology: Consider the dinosaur DNA that they were able to recover in the movie as a USB flash drive from 65.5 million years ago. Life, like technology, finds a way. 

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For $249, Color Genomics wants to tell you if you have the genetic mutations that could predispose you to certain types of cancer.

Color launched last April with its breast and ovarian cancer screening test, which looked at 19 genetic markers, parts of our DNA that have been linked to certain conditions. On Thursday the company expanded the test to include 11 more genetic markers, including those that have been linked with a higher risk of developing colorectal, melanoma, uterine, pancreatic, prostate, and stomach cancer.

Here's how it works:

1. Call your doctor. Because it gives out some serious medical information, Color requires that you have a physician involved. If you don't want to include your own doctor, Color will link you with an independent physician who'll evaluate your information and assign you a test — if they decide it's the right move. Either way, you or your doctor can order the test directly through Color's website. 
2. After registering online, you'll get a testing kit in the mail. 
3. Collect your spit, like you would with many other genetics tests. It might feel a bit awkward.  
4. Send in your spit for Color to analyze. They'll return the results to you and your doctor.
5. Still want to learn more? Color provides a free genetics counselor to discuss your results further as part of its process if you're so inclined. 

Knowing what mutations you have is a key part of understanding your genetic risk of certain types of cancer, a highly complex science that researchers are still teasing out. Other lifestyle factors, like how often you exercise and what you eat, play a role too, but tests like those Color offers look specifically at your genetic risks.

"That risk is there in your genes independent of whether you know about it or not," Color President Othman Laraki told Business Insider. "The way modern medicine is conducted, prevention is dramatically still underweighted, relative to its impact. But it's a trend that's on the up."

For example, the risk of getting breast cancer goes from 7% to an average of 55-65% when you have the BRCA1 or 2 gene mutation. Knowing you have one of these genetic tweaks, then, could ostensibly help you make more proactive decisions, like getting more frequent cancer screenings or eating healthier.

Here's a chart showing which genetic mutations Color screens for, and their association with increased cancer risk:

The price of Color's test will remain the same, even with the additions. Laraki told Business Insider that the choice to keep the price point was "very deliberate," as other tests for hereditary cancer risk can tend to run much higher costs up to the $1,000s without insurance (though some, like Counsyl's inherited screening test go for $349 without insurance).

"The goal is to minimize the cost barrier in terms of access," Laraki said.

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The ancestry of modern Europeans has been traced back to a single founding group of early humans living in the north west of the continent about 35,000 years ago.

Researchers analyzed the DNA from 51 prehistoric Europeans to find migration patterns and population changes over thousands of years.

Fossil evidence shows early humans first entered Europe roughly 45,000 years ago.

However, little is known about their genetic ancestry before the onset of agriculture, some 8,000 years ago.

Between their arrival and agriculture, Europe saw the end of the last Ice Age. Ice sheets that had covered northern Europe and Scandinavia between 25,000 and 19,000 years ago began to retreat.

A team of scientists, led by Harvard's David Reich, has now carried out the most comprehensive analysis of early European DNA to date.

Previously, genetic data on just four prehistoric Europeans was available. "Trying to represent this vast period of European history with just four samples is like trying to summarize a movie with four still images," Reich said.

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We might look, act and feel very different from one another. But when it comes to our genetic makeup, every person on the planet is nearly identical.

To prove this, scientist Riccardo Sabatini took the genome of his friend Craig and printed his genetic code, letter by letter, into a series of physical books.

Our genomes are made of DNA, and within DNA there are four bases: adenine ("A"), cytosine ("C"), guanine ("G"), and thymine ("T"). Human genomes contain more than 3 billion of these letters and the sequences they're in determine a lot about us, from eye color to which diseases we'll develop.

Given that there are so many letters in the human genome, it took Sabatini 172 books and 262,000 pages to print Craig's entire genetic makeup. He wheeled out all the books on stage during a Ted talk in February. All of the books combined weighed about 1,000 pounds.

"For the first time in history, this is the genome of a specific human, printed page-by-page, letter-by-letter: 262,000 pages of information," Sabatini told the audience. "This is the visual perception of what is the code of life ... millions of letters. And they apparently make sense. Let's get to a specific part [and read it]."

Sabatini picked up a book and began to flip through the pages. 

"AAG, AAT, ATA," he read.

While that sounds like nonsense, Sabatini explained that those 9 letters are actually the sequence that determined the color of Craig's eyes.

He picked up another book and flipped the pages again.

"ATT, CTT, GATT," he read.

"This human is lucky, because if you miss just two letters in this position — two letters of our three billion — he will be condemned to a terrible disease: cystic fibrosis. We have no cure for it, we don't know how to solve it, and it's just two letters of difference from what we are."

Perhaps more startling is learning how very few of these letters and sequences give us our individual characteristics. Out of the 172 books, Sabatini says that just half of one book is what makes one person different from another. The other 171.5 books have identical codes.

"Every one of you -- what makes me, me and you, you -- is just about five million of these, half a book," Sabatini said. "For the rest, we are all absolutely identical. Five hundred pages is the miracle of life that you are. The rest, we all share it. So think about that again when we think that we are different. This is the amount that we share."

Here's Sabatini's full Ted Talk, below: 

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When it comes to our genes, there's very little variation from one human to the next — about 99.9% of our DNA is the same as the person sitting next to us. 

For example, in a recent TED talk, physicist and entrepreneur Riccardo Sabatini demonstrated that a printed version of the entire human genetic code would occupy some 262,000 pages, or 175 large books. Of those pages, just about 500 would be unique to each person.

The same holds true for other living things, like chimpanzees or cats. But what about egg-laying birds, like the chicken? As it turns out, about 60% of chicken genes have a human gene counterpart.

In a 2004 paper published in the journal Nature, the International Chicken Genome Sequencing Consortium found that although a chicken doesn't have as much DNA as a human, it has about the same amount of genes. And in those genes, there were stronger similarities to human genes when it came down to basic cell structures and how those cells work. When it came to the genes that program our reproductive and immune systems, the chicken genes were less similar.

To put that 60% in perspective, chimpanzees, our closest living evolutionary relative, share 96% of the same genes with humans. 

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I've shipped my spit to a lot of companies, like family-heritage site AncestryDNA and personal-genetics company 23andMe.

All that information I got from those tests was just the beginning. More recently, I wanted to take my genes a step further.

Pathway Genomics, which has been around since 2008, offers tests that cover everything from liquid biopsies (tests that look for circulating tumor cells in the blood) to tests that tell you how your body will interact with a certain medication.

One of its most popular tests, called Fit, takes a look at a subset of genes to give you a snapshot of how your body might respond to food and exercise based on your genetic makeup.

At $599, it's not the cheapest test out there, but I felt like this test was sometimes reading my mind:

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Soon after I ordered the test online, Pathway's shiny silver box arrived at the office.

Inside, I found a standard spit-collection kit, a bag to put it in, and a set of instructions and paperwork.

Like any other spit-based DNA test, Pathway's had me muster up a lot of spit. (My new trick: I picture eating sour foods, which make me salivate like crazy).

The largest study of its kind has found 74 genetic variants that influence how many years of school people finish, scientists reported on Wednesday, but their effect is relatively minor, underlining how a complex behavior like going to college is not written in our DNA.

Although such behavioral genetics studies might once have been trumpeted as “genes for going to college,” the international consortium of 253 researchers reached a more modest conclusion: Altogether, the 74 genes explain slightly less than one-half of 1 percent of the differences between people’s education levels.

Behavioral genetics has long been notorious for producing spurious findings. It has also been controversial, with critics calling it pointless (because environmental factors exert stronger effects on behavior) and even dangerous, misleading the public into thinking that complex behaviors such as getting divorced or committing crimes or being a political liberal are the inevitable product of inherited genes.

Experts who have raised cautions about some behavioral genetics studies, however, praised this one.

“I think this is a great paper,” said molecular psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Flint of the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the new study. “They have made an immense step forward” from previous research.

He and other scholars emphasized the study’s modest claims.

“The authors are pretty careful to explain that the effect size is small [and] that these are not ‘genes for educational attainment,’” said Nita Farahany of Duke University School of Law, an expert on the ethical, legal, and social implications of behavioral genetics and a member of President Obama’s bioethics commission.

“Whenever you study things close to IQ there is a real fear that people will see this as genetic determinism,” in which DNA is fate, Farahany said. In fact, so many environmental factors shape educational attainment that the 74 genetic variants “don’t explain individual differences.”

Nevertheless, Farahany said, the finding that many of the years-of-school genes act in the developing brain before birth made the study significant.

The new research, published in Nature, was an extension of a 2013 study by many of the same scientists, who belong to the Social Science Genetics Association Consortium. Formed in 2011 and funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, the group aims to find links between genes and outcomes that interest social scientists, such as personality, levels of happiness, and preferences.

The earlier study, of 126,559 people, identified three genes whose different forms were associated with more or fewer years of schooling. Each of the three explained about 0.02 percent of the differences in years of schooling among the individuals.

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We all know that we get our noses from our parents (you can thank mom and dad, Mr. Lincoln).

But which genes predominantly shape your schnoz were poorly understood until now.

Scientists have pinpointed just which genes affect nose shape, and reported their discoveries in the journals Nature Communications.

The team of researchers looked at 6,000 men and women from Latin America of varying ancestry (50% European, 45% Native American, and 5% African).

About 3,000 of the individuals got their faces 3-D scanned to determine precise facial proportions. Finally, the scientists looked at 14 distinct facial features and compared them with the full genomes of the people to pinpoint any responsible genes.

The team identified four genes that affect how our noses are shaped — specifically, the width and "pointiness."

A gene called GLI3 was shown to strongly affect nostril width and, to a lesser extent, the PAX1 gene. The gene DCH2 seems to control nasal pointiness, which results in a "button nose." And all three are known to control cartilage growth. The fourth nose gene, RUNX2 controls bone growth, and affects the the width of the nose bridge.

The analysis didn't just stop at noses. Researchers also identified a gene, EDAR, that affects chin protrusion.

Learning about how our noses developed can help us understand how we evolved from archaic forms of human into our modern species, and could help us piece together the mystery of our divergent human cousins, the Neanderthals.

Is there a point to our species' nose diversity, or is our varied schnoz shape just a happy accident?

"It has long been speculated that the shape of the nose reflects the environment in which humans evolved," said Andrés Ruiz-Linares, a geneticist at University College London who led the study, in a press release. "For example, the comparatively narrower nose of Europeans has been proposed to represent an adaptation to a cold, dry climate."

So while it may seem ridiculous and random, there's a reason for your nose's shape and there are a number of factors affecting that goofy little appendage on the front of your face.

Join the conversation about this story »

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Ever considered getting a peek inside your genes?

Today, it seems easy. Find a personalized gene-testing service — there are more than a dozen companies in the US alone — spit in one of the tubes the company sends you, pop it in the mail, and check out your results online.

But how much can the average person learn from one of these tests?

We chatted with Columbia University professor Dr. Robert Klitzman, a bioethicist and psychology professor and the author of the recent book "Am I My Genes?" to find out:

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They can't predict the future.

No evidence-based process for assessing personal genetic tests yet exists. Nevertheless, according to EGAPP, an CDC-backed initiative launched in 2004 to come up one such system, more than 1,000 genetics tests are available today.

So what can the average person find out from one of these tests? Not a whole lot, it turns out.

"For the vast majority of people who take personalized genetics tests, their results will have no predictive value," said Klitzman. In other words, while some rare diseases like Tay-Sachs or Huntington's have been linked with mutations on a few specific and identifiable genes, many illnesses and traits are much more complex. For most of these, scientists haven't come close to identifying all the genes the conditions might involve.

Some diseases are linked with just one or two specific genes.

Some diseases are directly caused by specific mutations.

Tay-Sachs, a fatal disorder that destroys the nervous system, for example, is caused by a mutation in a gene that's responsible for making a special protein that blocks that gene from doing its job.

People who inherit just one defective copy of this gene are healthy (their other healthy copy can do the work of the mutated one), but they can still pass on the defective gene to their children, raising their chances of developing the disease. To develop Tay-Sachs, you have to inherit two defective copies of the gene. So, if a genetic test tells you you're carrying the Tay-Sachs gene, it means you could pass it on to your kids.

Other diseases like Huntington's. can develop with only one copy of a faulty gene.

With other diseases, the connection is looser. For instance, having a gene "for" breast cancer does not mean you will get breast cancer.

Saying you have the gene "for" an illness typically means that one or both copies of a gene (you have two copies of each gene, one from each parent) has a mutation that's been linked with that illness. But having a mutated gene does not necessarily mean you'll develop that illness.

In 2013, Angelina Jolie wrote an article in the New York Times about her decision to have her breasts removed after she'd discovered she had a genetic mutation that dramatically raised her risk of developing breast cancer (she also had a family history of breast cancer). About 10% of all breast cancers in the US are linked to the mutation Jolie had. About 90% of all breast cancers are not.

In other words, having the mutation doesn't necessarily mean you'll get breast cancer, but it does mean that you're significantly more likely to get it — especially if you also have a family history of it. And not having the mutation doesn't mean you're risk-free. In other words, "you could have the mutation and not get it, or you could not have the mutation and get it," said Klitzman.

DNA testing is getting smaller, faster, and more convenient. In 2014, scientists unveiled a sequencer the size of a brick, and now a biotechnology company has built one the size of a coffee cup.

On May 31, Spartan Bioscience, which is based in Ottawa, unveiled a portable DNA tester called the Spartan Cube. The cube measures 4 inches in all directions, which makes it the world's smallest genetic testing device. The company says it can yield results in less than half an hour.

The machine can test for a range of human diseases, and can also be used to detect infectious bacteria in foods, find harmful microbes in water, or see if your dog has kennel cough. 

Here's how it works: Users place the sample they want to test — be it saliva, water or another substance — into a small tube and place it inside the cube. The device comes with a variety of test kits that correspond to the specific diseases and bacteria that users might want to test for. Each kit has a barcode, and when you scan it, the machine runs the appropriate program to test the sample.

The cube uses a polymerase chain reaction system to see if there's a match. if you took high school biology, you probably did this with cheek swabs — think of it like searching for a specific term in a body of text on a computer, except with DNA. 

Users can connect the cube to a tablet or laptop via WiFi, and the results will show up there once they're ready. 

So if you want to find out whether you have Strep throat, for example, you can insert a throat swab into a test tube, place it in the cube, scan the pre-programmed kit for Strep, and get a yes or no answer on your computer in less than 30 minutes.

Spartan CEO Paul Lem tells Tech Insider in an email that the device is meant to be used as a "detector," not a full sequencing service.

"It's not a genome sequencer that provides millions of data points. It's a portable DNA testing system that provides several data points. This device is ideal when you want a quick and accurate yes or no answer," Lem says.

Spartan Bioscience has a prototype ready, but has not disclosed a timeline for a wider market release. The company plans on making the initial "assays," or scannable test kits, available at the American Association for Clinical Chemistry's Clinical Lab Expo in Philadelphia on July 31. 

In an interview with ResearchGate, Lem said that he's aiming for the product to be "affordable." Though no specific price has been announced yet, Lem said he hopes the Spartan Cube will make DNA testing available to mainstream consumers in the same way that Microsoft's PCs turned computers into household products.

Other companies are also bringing DNA testing technology — which has been used in forensics and hospital labs since the early '90s— to mainstream consumers. Genetics testing company 23AndMe, for example, allows customers to send saliva samples into a lab to be sequenced and scanned for hereditary diseases and health conditions. Ancestry.com, which helps users learn about their heritage and find potential relatives, also provides a similar mail-in test kit.

Direct-to-consumer genetics testing comes with several privacy concerns, however. 23AndMe has been criticized for making genetic data too easily available to law enforcement and for collecting its customers' genetic data. But Spartan Bioscience says this won't be a concern for the Cube, since any data generated will be kept on the user's tablet rather than in a centralized database.

Soon, you won't have to lug yourself to a lab or even mail in a sample to get tested for STDs or staph infections. You'll be able to do it in the privacy of your home.

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Of all the possible applications for a still-new, revolutionary gene editing technology that's frequently described as something that will reshape the world, one of the most intriguing — but controversial — is the ability to create what's known as a gene drive system.

Now a prominent group of experts has officially endorsed ongoing research toward making this "God-like" power a reality.

Simply put, a gene drive allows scientists to fundamentally alter the DNA of some members of species in such a way that the change they've made will then spread to the rest of the population.

Instead of sometimes passing on this new trait, like humans do with characteristics like red hair, this newly engineered trait will always be passed on, altering not just individual creatures but an entire species. (To be clear, no one is proposing turning all humans into redheads.)

Scientists have contemplated using this technology to make it so that mosquitoes can't carry and pass on malaria anymore, or even to wipe out whole populations of mosquitoes (via mass sterilization) — a topic that's come up again recently as a possible way to control the spread of Zika. Others are considering trying to use it to make mice that can't be infected with Lyme disease, which could stop that illness from spreading to the ticks that then infect humans.

Still, changing the nature of life itself would transform ecosystems in a way that could be difficult if not impossible to reverse.

Now, a major new report ("Gene Drives on the Horizon") by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine offers support for continuing research and even conducting field trials with gene drives.

The report concludes that the potential benefits of gene drives are important enough that researchers should test them, though more research will be needed before actually releasing a gene drive system into the wild.

The National Academies experts studied the issue for a year before issuing the report, and even though it suggests only a cautious push forward, the decision will be controversial.

MIT Media Lab Professor Kevin Esvelt, who first realized that the gene-editing technology CRISPR could create gene drives in the first place, has described the controversy to MIT Technology Review's Antonio Regalado by asking, "Do you really have the right to run an experiment where if you screw up, it affects the whole world?"

Still, Esvelt mostly agrees with the National Academies guidelines for proceeding with this research.

"If I had to pick a single take-home, it would be that a one-size-fits-all approach will not work with gene drives because outcomes will depend on the organism, the type of alteration, the ecosystem, and affected communities," he tells the Genetic Experts News Service (GENeS).

Still Esvelt has one major issue with the guidelines, as they don't explicitly require scientists to publicly disclose these experiments before conducting them.

"Everything in the Academy report points to this same conclusion about public disclosure. They just don’t explicitly acknowledge it," he tells GENeS. "And that’s a pity, because gene drive systems are intrinsically about altering the shared environment. We should at the very least have the courtesy to inform people what is being planned – and let them voice their opinions – before we begin."

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Theoretical physicists have confirmed that it's not just the information coded into our DNA that shapes who we are - it's also the way DNA folds itself that controls which genes are expressed inside our bodies.

That's something biologists have known for years, and they've even been able to figure out some of the proteins responsible for folding up DNA. But now a group of physicists have been able to demonstrate for the first time through simulations how this hidden information controls our evolution.

Let's back up for a second here, because although it's not necessarily news to many scientists, this second level of DNA information might not be something you're familiar with.

As you probably learnt in high school, Watson and Crick discovered in 1953 that the DNA code that determines who we are is made up of a sequence of the letters G, A, C, and T. 

The order of these letters determines which proteins are made in our cells. So, if you have brown eyes, it's because your DNA contains a particular series of letters that encodes for a protein that makes the dark pigment inside your iris.

But that's not the whole story, because all the cells in your body start out with the exact same DNA code, but every organ has a very different function - your stomach cells don't need to produce the brown eye protein, but they do need to produce digestive enzymes. So how does that work?

Since the '80s, scientists have found that the way DNA is folded up inside our cells actually controls this process. Environmental factors can play a big role in this process too, with things like stress known to turn certain genes on and offthrough something known as epigenetics.

But the mechanics of the DNA folding is the original control mechanism. That's because every single cell in our body contains around 2 metres of DNA, so to fit inside us, it has to be tightly wrapped up into a bundle called a nucleosome - like a thread around a spool.

And the way the DNA is wrapped up controls which genes are 'read' by the rest of the cell - genes that are all wrapped on the inside won't be expressed as proteins, but those on the outside will. This explains why different cells have the same DNA but different functions.

In recent years, biologists have even started to isolate the mechanical cues thatdetermine the way DNA is folded, by 'grabbing onto' certain parts of the genetic code or changing the shape of the 'spool' the DNA is wrapped around. 

So far, so good, but what do theoretical physicists have to do with all this?

A team from Leiden University in the Netherlands has now been able to step back and look at the process on a whole-genome scale, and confirm through computer simulations that these mechanical cues are actually coded into our DNA. 

The physicists, led by Helmut Schiessel, did this by simulating the genomes of both baker's yeast and fission yeast, and then randomly assigning them a second level of DNA information, complete with mechanical cues.

They were able to show that these cues affected how the DNA was folded and which proteins are expressed - further evidence that the mechanics of DNA are written into our DNA, and they're just as important in our evolution as the code itself.

This means the researchers have shown that there's more than one way that DNA mutations can affect us: by changing the letters in our DNA, or simply by changing the mechanical cues that arrange the way a strand is folded.

"The mechanics of the DNA structure can change, resulting in different packaging and levels of DNA accessibility,"they explain, "and therefore differing frequency of production of that protein."

Again, this is confirming what many biologists already knew, but what's really exciting is the fact that the computer simulations open up the possibility for scientists manipulate the mechanical cues that shape DNA - which means they might one day be able to fold DNA to hide unwanted genes, like the ones that trigger disease.

We're a long way off doing that, but the more scientists understand about how our DNA is controlled and folded, the closer we get to being able to improve upon it.

The research has been published in PLOS ONE.

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Twitter's former media head Katie Jacobs Stanton is becoming the latest tech executive to sign on to a health-tech startup.

For $249, Color Genomics wants to tell you if you have the genetic mutations that could predispose you to certain types of cancer. The cost is key to Color's mission of making the test more accessible than some other genetics tests that still costs thousands of dollars.

Stanton left Twitter in January after more than five years. She's been an investor in the company for a few years is joining Color Genomics as its chief marketing officer. She's been helping out the company part-time, but decided to go full-time starting in August.

What made her join was in part the mission of the company, as well as personal connections cancer through friends and family members. 

"I just didn't want to be on the sidelines anymore," Stanton told Business Insider. "I wanted to be part of this movement, part of something that's bigger than myself and something that's really profoundly meaningful that can have a positive impact."

Color launched its test in April 2015 and now offers an updated test that looks at 30 genetic markers, or parts of our DNA that have been linked to certain conditions. These genes are linked with a higher risk of developing, breast, ovarian, colorectal, melanoma, uterine, pancreatic, prostate, and stomach cancer.

Stanton's work will encompass communications, partnerships (including those with hospitals and clinics), as well as leading the charge toward an initiative to provide free tests to 100,000 men and women who wouldn't otherwise have access to these tests. 

How a Color Genomics test works:

1. Call your doctor. Because it gives out some serious medical information, Color requires that you have a physician involved. If you don't want to include your own doctor, Color will link you with an independent physician who'll evaluate your information and assign you a test — if they decide it's the right move. Either way, you or your doctor can order the test directly through Color's website. 
2. After registering online, you'll get a testing kit in the mail. 
3. Collect your spit, like you would with many other genetics tests. It might feel a bit awkward.  
4. Send in your spit for Color to analyze. They'll return the results to you and your doctor.
5. Still want to learn more? Color provides a free genetics counselor to discuss your results further as part of its process if you're so inclined. 

Knowing what mutations you have is a key part of understanding your genetic risk of certain types of cancer, a highly complex science that researchers are still teasing out. Other lifestyle factors, like how often you exercise and what you eat, play a role too, but tests like those Color offers look specifically at your genetic risks.

For example, the risk of getting breast cancer goes from 7% to an average of 55-65% when you have the BRCA1 or 2 gene mutation. Knowing you have one of these genetic tweaks, then, could ostensibly help you make more proactive decisions, like getting more frequent cancer screenings or eating healthier. 

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What won Alexis Borisy over was the idea of software bugs.

Borisy, now a partner at Third Rock Ventures, along with four scientists affiliated with MIT and Harvard's Broad Institute who were leaders in cancer genomics got started back in 2008 working on what would soon become Foundation Medicine (No. 62 on the BI 100: The Creators), a company that sequences the DNA in cancer cells to get a better idea of what's going on.

That's where the software bugs come into play: The way Borisy sees it, cancer is a "disease of the human programming code." If you can read through a person's source code (aka genetic sequence), you can potentially figure out what "bugs" (mutations in the person's genes), then you'd have a better chance of figuring out better ways to fix that glitch. 

But turning that concept into reality wouldn't be easy. 

"The sequencing cost at that point was millions of dollars," Borisy told Business Insider about the original conversations in 2008. "But, they could see how powerful it was going to be in affecting lives of patients. "We need to figure out how to get this done in high quality way so it can be used day in day out in the practice of oncology," he remembers the conversations going.

Building the team

The company got its start on the fourth floor of Third Rock, which was Foundation's founding member. Borisy served as the company's first CEO, eventually becoming a partner at Third Rock in 2010, where he's gotten the chance to build up other biotechnology companies. In his place, he brought in Michael Pellini. At that point, Pellini had just sold his previous company to General Electric, so Borisy called him up. 

When he first got on the phone, he later told Borisy, Pellini was prepared to say no. But after that conversation, Pellini hung up and cursed. "It was his dream job, he knew he wasn’t going to say no," Borisy recounted. It wouldn't be an easy dream job — Pellini currently commutes to Foundation's offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts from his home in California  — but it's a position he's held since May 2011. Borisy stayed on as chairman at Foundation. 

A couple years later, Steve Kafka, Foundation's president and chief operating officer joined the team, adding expertise about the pharmaceutical industry "Steve was so the right person to go get as we began to scale. It's been a great partnership," Borisy said of Pellini and Kafka's roles.

Along the way, Foundation picked up backing from Google Ventures and Bill Gates before going public in 2013. Swiss pharma giant Roche also holds a majority stake in the company.

Finding the bugs and creating value

Foundation Medicine tries to help patients and doctors facing seriously hard-to-treat cancers by looking at the genetic makeup of that cancer (for example, the genetic mutations in a breast cancer patient could actually look more like a patient with colon cancer and thus those types of treatments could work better).

To do that, Foundation collects samples from cancer patients. The biopsy tests take a piece of cancer tissue (or sample of blood for blood-based cancers) and sequences the cancer's genes to really understand what makes the cells tick. In May, the company also launched its liquid biopsy test called FoundationACT, which looks for circulating tumor DNA in the blood.

From there, the data that's been collected goes into Foundation Medicine database where it can be used for everything from other doctors who want to know how to treat a certain rare cancer, or pharmaceutical companies interested in finding the patients who will respond the best to a drug that's in development.

Foundation is also preparing to vigorously protect its intellectual property. In May, the company received a patent that protects its cancer genomic sequencing process and later that day sued rival liquid biopsy company, Guardant Health.

But overall, the way Foundation is creating value is by identify these bugs, or genetic mutations, that could effectively streamlining the way oncologists approach cancer, not just in leading cancer institutes, but in local communities that see the majority of cancer patients. 

"Foundation is using that information and connecting the dots so that oncologists can get that patient onto that clinical trial, and it can make huge difference," he said. "If it's game-changing for patients, the returns will follow that."

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How often do you think about your genes?

While the answer may be "rarely" or "never," these tiny chunks of DNA can reveal a lot about us, from where we come from to what diseases we may be predisposed to.

And there's another aspect of your genes you probably also rarely think of: Who owns the tech that makes testing for all that information possible?

Illumina might not necessarily be a company with a household name, but  it has an immense presence within the life sciences industry. And Jay Flatley, the company's outgoing CEO, is the man who made it all happen. Flatley essentially created a market for genetic testing from scratch. How? He made it cheap. Flatley and his team brought the price point of sequencing an entire human genome down to just $1,000, down from the whopping $2.7 billion required to sequence the first human genome in 2003. Knowing every single bit of information that's encoded in your DNA can be a powerful tool, and bringing down the cost makes that information accessible to way more people. The San Diego, California-based company now has a market capitalization of $22 billion.

Of all the human genetic sequencing that's done, about90% happens using Illumina’s instruments. Considering companies like 23andMe — a direct-to-consumer genetics company whose test can tell you how much DNA you share with our Neanderthal ancestors to how much caffeine you likely consume — has sequenced the genes of more than 1 million people, and they're just one of the many companies using Illumina's tests.

"Illumina is like the ruler of this whole universe and no one knows that,” 23andMe's CEO Anne Wojcicki told Fast Company.

Basically, what Illumina can do is take a sample of your DNA — typically from your spit — and break it down into its most basic form. Then, it puts that basic information into a computer that can give you a comprehensive look at the exact order of your DNA. That information can be used to read back all the reports hundreds of genetics companies like 23andMe provide.

Not your average healthcare company

While Jay Flatley has served as Illumina’s CEO for nearly two decades, his tenure ends in July. Although he'll stay on as executive chairman, Flatley will be replaced as CEO by Francis deSouza, who came over from Intel in 2013.

During Flatley's time, the entire human genome was sequenced for the first time, and the cost has gone down exponentially. Illumina expanded its operations from 30 in 199 to almost 5,000 employees. IIlumina’s machines have been used in everything from consumer genetics tests that let companies tell you who your ancestors are, to finding new ways to develop drugs that target certain genetic mutations.

Illumina is not your average healthcare company. "One of the things that surprised me is how much Illumina is like a tech company,” deSouza told Forbes in March on the news that he would become the next CEO. Its basis in hardware and software make it much different from a company trying to research a new treatment to a disease.

Illumina's also spun out some of its projects that span the genetics world. In August 2015, the company spun out a startup called Helix that wants to be like an app store for your DNA. Essentially, it would be a way to connect your sequenced genetic information to a number of different tests, so that instead of spitting into a tube every time, companies could connect directly to the hard data. 

A few months later, the company announced that it was spinning out a company that wants to develop a blood test that screens for cancer. The spin-off company, called Grail, also got backing from a group of Silicon Valley investors including Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. The goal is to build a test that can identify the tiny bits of cancer DNA that are hanging out in our blood that are currently undetectable. With one simple blood draw, Grail's plan is to sequence and screen for those bits with the hope that it will help catch cancer before it starts to be a full-blown problem.

"Every day we don’t have a test available, lives are being lost," Grail's CEO Jeff Huber told Business Insider in February. The company plans to move at "tech-company speed" to minimize that loss. 

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