Lifeboat Foundation

Three hundred and sixty-six days ago, CeCe Moore woke up to the headline that would change her world: “Suspected Golden State Killer, East Area Rapist Arrested After Eluding Authorities for Decades.” Later that day, those authorities would hold a press conference in front of the Sacramento County District Attorney’s office to explain how, a day earlier, they had finally put handcuffs on the man believed to have committed a series of sadistic rapes and murders that spread terror through California for more than 40 years. But Moore didn’t have to tune in to know how they had done it. “I knew immediately they had cracked it with genetic genealogy and GEDmatch,” she says.

She knew it because at the time, Moore was working as the genetic genealogy researcher on the PBS show Finding Your Roots and had a consulting business helping adoptees find their biological parents. To aid her searches, she regularly logged on to GEDmatch, a public database where hobbyists upload results from consumer genetic testing companies like 23andMe and Ancestry to find relatives with shared DNA and to reverse-engineer their family trees. It had come to her attention that another genealogist on the site, Barbara Rae-Venter, had been uploading files that seemed out of place, and Moore suspected they came not from family members, but from crime scenes. But she had never imagined that one of them belonged to the man believed to be one of the most notorious serial killers in US history. “This was going to be huge,” she remembers telling people that day.

Continue reading “What the Golden State Killer Tells Us About Forensic Genetics” »

An AI system introduced in 2015 with much fanfare in the U.S. failed to recognise faces of African Americans with the same accuracy as those of Caucasian Americans. | Photo Credit: AP

N. Dayasindhu

Medical tourism has some overlap with the anti-aging market, but the way these consumers are thinking about their own longevity will likely bring up new questions for providers. Middle-aged Asian consumers don’t want to buy youth, they want to buy things that make them appreciate where they are right now.

Middle-aged Asian consumers are giving the anti-aging market a run for its money.

The tiny chip could improve the speed and efficiency of BCIs.

Jeff Bezos speaking at the grand opening of the Amazon Spheres, a new glass dome conservatory at the company’s Seattle headquarters. If going to space is vital for a thriving civilization, then we had better develop the synthetic biology tools and tech to enable it.

In a series of letters, former suspect Gary Oliva reportedly told his friend that her death was “an accident,” but he saw it happen.

By Chelsea Whyte

Policing power may be about to get much stronger, thanks to another advance in genetic analysis. A new technique can link the patchy, limited DNA information held in forensic databases to the rich DNA libraries held by family tree-building websites, raising further questions about genetic privacy.

Earlier this year, an ancestry database used by people looking to trace their family history was used to identify the suspected Golden State Killer, a serial killer active in California decades ago. Since his arrest in April, genealogy databases – which allow consumers to upload their DNA sequences – have been used to crack several other cold cases.

A water bottle recovered from a construction site where Tim DeSalvo – whose uncle Albert DeSalvo had confessed to being the internationally notorious Boston Strangler – gave police the DNA evidence they needed to bring closure to a case that has been a mystery for nearly 50 years, murders for which no one has ever been charged.

“This is really a story of relentlessness,’’ Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis explained today as Massachusetts top law enforcement officials revealed that DNA preserved from the body of the Boston Strangler’s last victim—raped and murdered in 1964—can now be linked with ”99.9 percent certainty” to the late Albert DeSalvo.

”This is good evidence. This is strong evidence. This is reliable evidence,’’ Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley said of the new DNA result. ”But there can be no doubt.”

A widespread outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease has killed one person and sickened possibly dozens of others who were all guests at the Sheraton Atlanta Hotel. The hotel evacuated all its guests on July 15 and remains closed as of press time.

Public health officials say a dozen guests had tested positive for Legionnaires’, a bacteria that can cause a severe form of pneumonia. But according to the attorney filing a lawsuit Monday, hundreds more may have been exposed.

By the time guests were evacuated in mid-July, 49-year-old Cameo Garrett was already dead. An autopsy showed she had coronary issues and Legionnaires’ disease. Garrett went to a conference at the Sheraton a week before she died – just like Germany Greer who said he became so sick at one point he didn’t even know his own name.