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First Early Human Genome Sequenced Say hello to Inuk By Susannah F. Locke Posted 02.10.2010 at 1:04 pm Artists Impression of "Inuk" Nuka Godfredsen Scientists have sequenced the genome of an ancient human for the first time. An international team extracted DNA from 4,000-year-old hair found in Greenland's permafrost. They were able to sequence an impressive 79 percent of the genetic material and shared a thing or two about this ancient Homo sapiens in this week's issue of the journal Nature. For starters, it's a dude, and they nicknamed him "Inuk." His DNA indicates that his ancestors left Siberia to travel to the new world before the ancestors of current natives of North America did. He also had brown eyes, thick hair, and darker skin. And, of course, other key traits we were just dying to know: he had dry earwax (common in Asians and Native Americans), a propensity to baldness, and type A+ blood. He was also inbred. Inbred to the sa...

News Dots: The Day's Events as a Social Network An interactive map of how every story in the news is related, updated daily. By Chris Wilson Like Kevin Bacon's co-stars, topics in the news are all connected by degrees of separation. To examine how every story fits together, News Dots visualizes the most recent topics in the news as a giant social network. Subjects—represented by the circles below—are connected to one another if they appear together in at least two stories, and the size of the dot is proportional to the total number of times the subject is mentioned. To use this interactive tool, just click on a circle to see which stories mention that topic and which other topics it connects to in the network. Double click a dot to zoom in on it. From there, you can click on any connected dot to see which stories mention both subjects. To zoom out, just double click in white space or use the zoom out button in the upper left corner. The buttons in the upper right can to...