Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo has won the Nobel Prize for medicine for pioneering the use of ancient DNA to unlock secrets about human evolution. Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo has won the Nobel ...

When scientists sequenced the first Neanderthal genomes, they did not just resurrect a lost branch of the human family tree, ...

If someone — like a disgruntled scientist, terror group, or rogue nation — were to synthesize and unleash smallpox, we could see the reemergence of a disease that killed three out of 10 people it ...

Bronze Age desert dwellers unearthed from graves in what’s now northwest China were buried with cheese scattered on their heads and necks — perhaps as a snack packed for the afterlife. A decade after ...

When once-living tissue is preserved in a cold, dry environment, fragments of its DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, DNA doesn't even have to remain in tissue; we've managed ...

When Italy’s Mount Vesuvius erupted violently in A.D. 79, a cloud of superheated ash killed thousands in and around the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. One of the victims, a ...

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Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo has won the Nobel Prize for medicine for pioneering the use of ancient DNA to unlock secrets about human evolution. The Nobel Committee said Monday that Pääbo ...