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Your genes give you blue eyes.  Your genes give you dark hair.  Your genes, in some cases (no pointing fingers!), also make you fat. But did you know they can determine how many friends you may have?   According to newswise.com, r esearchers have found that the genes that regulate oxytocin, the supreme human social hormone, are associated with the sociality of young individuals. Why some individuals seek social engagement and friendship while others shy away, may well be dependent on the expression and sequence of two genes in their bodies, the web site reports. These genes appear in people who   have more close friends and show greater social skills.The hormone released by these genes in humans are involved in primary social behaviors such as pair-bonding, mating and child-rearing, to more sophisticated behaviors such as empathy, trust and generosity. “We believe that studying the expression of genes captures more information than simple structural studi...

Both my husband and I dated people who liked to party and stay out all night.  Needless to say, the relationships didn't work out. He and I are both morning people.  And now a new study says it may just be in our DNA. According to newswise.com, the study found that there may be genes in our DNA that can be linked back to someone who is a morning person.   “In this study we set out to discover more about an individual’s preference toward early rising and were able to identify the genetic associations with “morningness” as well as ties to lifestyle patterns and other traits,” says Youna Hu, PhD, who led 23andMe’s research on the paper. The study revolved around a database that yielded genetic insights into a variety of conditions and traits, and potentially how those genetic factors are affected by behavior and environment.   Morningness is governed by differences in circadian rhythm, which have previously been linked to medically relevant traits such as...

Nature or nurture? Turns out we're a little of both. Recently scientists decided to see if who we really are is more what's inside us or what happens to us outside in the world.  Guess what?  Both. As someone who is prone to pessimism, I was long ago counseled to change the way I looked at things rather than bumping my head up against things I cannot control.  It took a very long time but finally I began to see that not winning a statewide writing award didn't mean I was a bad writer, just that, this particular time, people wrote articles and essays that were better than mine. Then, when it turned out I did win, I had almost forgotten about it.  (I won first place.) Of course, it's not easy to look at the dark side of life and be optimistic.  But I wouldn't call trying to hold on to perspective -- because that's what it is -- a bad thing. I remember in fourth grade, when my son didn't get the "star" teacher and I was convinced that his ...

Would you want to know if you had cancer in your future?  Thanks to all the milestones researchers are making in genes and genetic makeup, you probably can. According to newswise.com, using a small amount of blood or saliva, a technology called whole genome sequencing makes that possible – and more than half of parents surveyed  said they’d not only be interested in the technology for themselves but for their children too, a new nationally-representative University of Michigan study shows. For obvious reasons, mothers as a group in the study and parents whose youngest children had more than two health conditions had significantly more interest in predictive genetic testing for themselves and their youngest children while those with conservative political ideologies had considerably less interest. More than three- fourths of parents also showed the same interest in genome sequencing for themselves as they did for their kids. As a cancer survivor, would I have want...

I've always loved my husband's hands.  Thin and long-fingered, they're delicate, like a sculptor's or a pianist's, and yet strong, too.  (He's yanked many a tooth in his career.) Now experts are saying that you can tell a lot about a man by looking at his hands . Not to be confused with other parts of his body! But men with short index fingers and long ring fingers are on average nicer towards women, and this stems -- believe it or not -- from the hormones these men have been exposed to in their mother’s womb, according to a new study by researchers at McGill University.  Something new to blame mothers for! Men with these kinds of hands also tend to have more children. That's not entirely clear but there's a definite link between fetal life and adult behavior.  “It is fascinating to see that moderate variations of hormones before birth can actually influence adult behaviour in a selective way,” says Simon Young, a McGill Emeritus Professor ...

Have some really good friends?  You may be closer to them than you think. A new study has found that we may share genes with our friends.  A genome-wide analysis has shown that we share some genetic similarities with our friends, according to newswise.com. A study from the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University finds that friends who are not biologically related still resemble each other genetically. Hmm.  I wonder how good a friend you have to be?  Anyway. . . "We have more DNA in common with the people we pick as friends than we do with strangers in the same population," the Web site quotes study coauthor James Fowler, professor of medical genetics and political science at UC San Diego. The study is a genome-wide analysis of nearly 1.5 million markers of gene variation, and relies on data from the Framingham Heart Study.  The researchers focused on 1,932 unique subjects and compared pairs of unrelated friends against pairs of un...

Is it in your genes?  Your ability to be compassionate , and sensitive, that's what. A new study has found that, if you jump to help the less fortunate, cry during sad movie scenes, or tweet and post the latest topics and photos that excite or move you, you may be among the 20 percent of our population that is genetically pre-disposed to empathy, according to Stony Brook University psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron. Newswise.com reports that Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) of brains provide physical evidence that the “highly sensitive” brain responds powerfully to emotional images. People who tend to show heightened awareness to subtle stimuli, process information more thoroughly, and be more reactive to both positive and negative stimuli. In contrast, the majority of people have comparatively low sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) and pay less attention to subtle stimuli, approach situations more quickly and are not as emotionally reactive. In my ...

 How's this for a scary prognosis?  Family violence leaves genetic traces. Newswise.com reports that a new Tulane University School of Medicine study finds that the more fractured families are by domestic violence or trauma, the more likely that children will bear the scars down to their DNA. Researchers discovered that children in homes affected by domestic violence, suicide or the incarceration of a family member have significantly shorter telomeres, which is a cellular marker of aging, than those in stable households.  Those with shorter telomeres die younger. Telomeres are the caps at the end of chromosomes that keep them from shrinking when cells replicate. Shorter telomeres are linked to higher risks for heart disease, obesity, cognitive decline, diabetes, mental illness and poor health outcomes in adulthood. “Family-level stressors, such as witnessing a family member get hurt, created an environment that affected the DNA within the cells of t...

Great.  Now they've found a new cancer. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic have found when two certain genes come together during an abnormal but recurring chromosomal mismatch, they can be dangerous. The result is a chimera — a gene that is half of each — and that causes a tumor that usually begins in the nose and may infiltrate the rest of the face, requiring disfiguring surgery to save the individual, newswise.com reports.  Chimera is also a word used to describe a fire-breathing female monster with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail. Scarily, the cancer strikes 75 percent of the time in women. Scientists at the Mayo Clinic have pinned down the genetic structure and molecular signature of this seldom-recognized type of cancer, according to newswise.com. It is rare, but how rare no one knows as most of the cases examined were initially diagnosed as various other types of cancer. “It’s unusual that a condition or disease is recognized, subse...

It's a sad fact, but true.  Black women are far more likely to die of breast cancer than white women. It's mainly because the cancer is often more advanced when it's found in black women, partly because white women are more likely to have regular check-ups and mammograms. I remember when I was having radiation for cancer and running into a beautiful young black woman who could not have been more than 20, there for the same reason as I. Now a new study has found that black women tend to present with more aggressive forms of cancer, too, or as the study put it, "biologically less favorable subtypes of breast cancer."  “It’s important that research continues to address these issues comprehensively, from the biology of the disease to the development of optimal treatment and access to healthcare," the Web site quotes Raquel Nunes, MD, a medical oncologist at the Washington Cancer Institute, who presented the study. “This work is particularly meaningful...

First they blamed the moms.  Then they blamed the vaccines.  Now research is showing that some cases of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may actually be environmentally-caused. The findings, according to newswise.com, "shed light on why older mothers are at increased risk for having children with ASD and could pave the way for more research into the role of environment on ASD."  The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in March that one in 68 U.S. children has an ASD—a 30 percent rise from 1 in 88 two years ago. A significant number of people with an ASD have gene mutations that are responsible for their condition. But a number of studies—particularly those involving identical twins, in which one twin has ASD and the other does not—show that not all ASD cases arise from mutations, the Web site reports.  Other studies have shown that genes may only be responsible in half  the cases of ASD diagnosed, newswise notes.  Media ...

We've been called the weaker sex .  But did you know we're really the survivors?  And it all has to do with placenta. A University of Adelaide research team has been studying the underlying genetic and developmental reasons why male babies generally have worse outcomes than females, with significantly increased rates of pregnancy complications and poor health outcomes for males, according to newswise.com. "Our research has found that there are undeniable genetic and physiological differences between boys and girls that extend beyond just the development of their sexual characteristics," the Web site quotes senior author of the paper Professor Claire Roberts , leader of the fetal growth research priority for the Robinson Research Institute . "We've known for some time that girls are clearly winning in the battle for survival, with markedly better outcomes for female babies for preterm birth, stillbirth, neonatal death, and other complications afte...

We've been told over and over how much being overweight or obese can affect our health. But what if it were to affect your treatment of cancer? A new study has found that calorie restriction, a kind of dieting in which food intake is decreased by a certain percentage, may improve outcomes for women in breast cancer. "According to a study published May 26th in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment , the triple negative subtype of breast cancer – one of the most aggressive forms – is less likely to spread, or metastasize, to new sites in the body when mice were fed a restricted diet," newswise.com reports. The Web site notes that when mouse models of triple negative cancer were fed 30 percent less than what they ate when given free access to food, the cancer cells decreased their production of RNA molecules that inhibit tumor growth. Researchers have found that these molecules, or genes, often increased in triple negative cancers that metastasize.  Breast can...

I've wondered this for a very long time.  Can your genes make you kill? Scientists are actually mapping Adam Lanza's genes to find out, according to smartplanet.com.  Remember him?  He's hard to forget.  He's the mass murderer of 20 Connecticut first-graders and six of their teachers and administrators two years ago.   The Web site notes that no one has ever sequenced a mass murderer’s genes. "And the plan to do so, by University of Connecticut geneticists, is being conducted quietly and far from the media spotlight. The University won't comment on its research, other than to admit that they indeed undertook it. It's not clear whether they have concluded their research, but the scientists most likely looked for mutations linked to mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, autism or Asperger’s—a diagnosis psychiatrists had given Lanza years before his rampage. Neither the researchers nor the medical examiner’s office have said what they plan to do with t...

Are you sick of reading about obesity?  I know I sometimes am.  But a new study has some startling, and frightening, facts about colon cancer and obesity. It says obesity primes the colon for cancer, as demonstrated in the study on mice. Obesity, rather than diet, causes changes in the colon that may lead to colorectal cancer, according to a study in mice, as reported by newswise.com. A large body of scientific literature says people who are obese are predisposed to a number of cancers, particularly colorectal cancer. Like many things, it all comes down to a gene.  “The obese mice exhibited molecular signals in their gut that led to the progression of cancer, but the NAG-1 mice didn’t have those same indicators,” says  Thomas Eling, Ph.D., a scientist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After a series of experiments, Eling and his team discovered that gene p atterns from obese...

A couple of weeks ago we learned that Vitamin D might prevent breast cancer.  Now researchers are turning to a new letter in the alphabet.  They're saying that a  derivative of  Vitamin A ,  known as retinoic acid, found abundantly in sweet potato and carrots, helps turn pre-cancer cells back to normal healthy breast cells. Wish we'd known that nine years ago, when my first pre-cancerous breast cells were found. The vitamin doesn’t appear to change "the course of full-blown cancer, only pre-cancerous cells, and only works at a very narrow dose," according to newswise.com, reporting on the study. Scientists created a  model of breast cancer progression composed of four types of cells each one representing a different stage of breast cancer: normal, pre-cancerous, cancerous and a fully aggressive model.   "When the researchers exposed the four breast cell types to different concentrations of retinoic acid – one of the chemicals that the body con...

Have you ever wondered why more boys than girls suffer from autism ? Now experts may have the answer. Blame it on mutations. It takes more mutations to trigger autism in women than in men, which may explain why men are four times more likely to have the disorder, according to a new study as reported at newswise.com. The study found that women with autism or developmental delay tend to have more large disruptions in their genomes than do men with the disorder. Inherited mutations are also more likely to be passed down from unaffected mothers than from fathers. Together, the results suggest that women are resistant to mutations that contribute to autism, the Web site notes. “This strongly argues that females are protected from autism and developmental delay and require more mutational load, or more mutational hits that are severe, in order to push them over the threshold,” newswise quotes lead researcher Evan Eichler, professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington ...

Designer babies.  We've been reading about them lately.  A lab in the U.S. has found a way to take DNA from three different monkeys -- sperm from one, and unfertilized eggs from a young and older female monkey, extracting the DNA from both eggs, inserting the DNA into the younger, fresher egg, and producing a baby that has the genes of the older monkey in the youthful shell of the younger monkey. Sound surreal?  It's already happened with humans in a clinic, according to The New York Times, and Fox News reports that 19 babies have been born this way since 2001.  The idea originally was to allow women with known genetic abnormalities to screen for these birth defects in lab-created embryos to find those without the mutations. Currently something like this can be done through in-vitro fertilization using a method called pre-implant genetic diagnosis (PGD) but it wouldn't help women like me who wanted to have a baby with her own genetics but whose eggs were jus...

Men, contrary to what you may have been hearing, the male chromosome is not destined to disappear. According to Medical News Daily (MND), "The Y chromosome has lost 90 percent of the genes it once shared with the X chromosome, and some scientists have speculated that the Y chromosome will disappear in less than 5 million years," said evolutionary biologist Melissa A. Wilson Sayres, a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of the new analysis. Though some mammals have already lost their Y chromosome, they still have males and females, and reproduce normally, MND reports. And last month, researchers reported shuffling some genes in mice to create Y-less males that could produce normal offspring, leading some commentators to wonder whether the chromosome is superfluous. "Our study demonstrates that the genes that have been maintained, and those that migrated from the X to the Y, a...

Who knew?  But moms who have a lot of sex partners have sexier male children.  We're talking mice, of course. At least that's what a new study has found, according to newswise.com. "University of Utah biologists found that when mother mice compete socially for mates in a promiscuous environment, their sons play hard (read: make lots of babies) and die young," according to the Web site. The male mice attract more females by making more urinary pheromones, but smelling sexier shortens their lives. (Not sure this would work for humans.) “If your sons are particularly sexy, and mate more than they would otherwise, it’s helping get your genes more efficiently into the next generation,” newswise.com quotes biology professor Wayne Potts, senior author of the new study. Yet there's no faking that male mice who create more baby mice run out of life more quickly.  In the study, only 48 percent of these hard-working mice lived to the end of the experiment, compared ...