Foundations of Science

The vast majority of people who suffer severe complications from influenza are elderly or have compromised immune systems. In fact, almost 90% of people who die as a result of a flu infection in the United States are over 65, an age when the immune system’s ability to fight infection begins to wane. But with the fiercest flu season in almost a decade occurring in 2018, news stories about otherwise healthy adults…

In honor of Mother’s Day, let’s take a closer look at the “female” sex chromosome: The X. Not to stir up a battle of the sexes, but the X chromosome (females have two of them, while males have one) is five times larger than the Y chromosome, and has 10 times the number of genes. That means it carries more traits — and diseases — than the Y chromosome.

The rate of deaths from all cancers combined continued its quarter-century-long steady decline in the U.S., according to the latest report by the American Cancer Society, with the death rate dropping 1.7 percent between 2014 and 2015— the latest year for which national statistics were available. Since 1991, cancer death rates have decreased 26…

The bowhead whale, the mammal with the longest known lifespan, can survive to 200, while the average rat lives only two to three years, and squirrels can often live over a decade. What explains a species’ longevity? There’s still much to learn when it comes to decoding the link between genetics and longevity, but, increasingly, studies into a range of genes are revealing tantalizing clues about the role that the…

Genetic testing companies use complex methods to determine your ancestry. But how accurate are they? For any two people in the world, 99.5 percent of their DNA is identical (99.9 percent for any two people of the same sex), yet it’s only human to latch on to that 0.5 percent and seek out what makes you special. As of 2016, nearly 3 million genetic ancestry tests have been sold, thanks in part to popular TV shows…