There’s a hidden clock that underlies every process of every living thing — from when our cells start dividing to how quickly we age. Researchers at Darpa, the Pentagon’s extreme science agency, believes they can find it, using a mash-up of biology, code-cracking, mathematics and computer science.

If the effort succeeds — and, boy, is that a big if — the recently announced Biochronicity program could help us understand why cancer is so hard to beat, how stem cells self renew and why cells are programmed to die. In other words, it’ll be one of the biggest breakthroughs Darpa has ever had.

Scienti...

By Katie Scott, Wired UK

It has been a long held belief that our human ancestors came into contact with Neanderthals, and recent findings not only confirm this, but also suggest exactly how “close” this contact was.

Damian Labuda of the University of Montreal’s Department of Pediatrics and the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center and team have found part of the human X chromosome comes from the Neanderthals and is found only in people outside of Africa.

In a paper published in the July issue of the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, the geneticists write: “We provide e...