Men More Evolved?

Kind of, but not really - see the video.

King Tut's Hardship

JAMA reports that King Tut - the boy king - suffered from serious bone disease and malaria.

Using genetic fingerprints from Tut and presumed relatives, a family tree revealed history of clubfoot and scoliosis. CAT scans revealed foot deformities, fractured femur, and bone necrosis (foot bone dying due to poor blood circulation). DNA also contained "Plasmodium falciparum" - i.e. Tut and his great-grandparents suffered from malaria.

Researchers think a weak Tut broke his leg which, coupled with malaria, took his life.

Gene Therapy Cures Color Blindness

Nature reports that researchers used gene therapy to cure a form of color-blindness in adult squirrel monkeys.

Lacking a visual pigment called L-opsin, these monkeys cannot distinguish reds and green. Scientists introduced the pigment gene into the eyes of color-blind adults. 1 month later, the monkeys with the new L-opsin gene could see hues they’d never seen before.

Research is not mature enough to be tested on humans, but it is promising

Man's Best Friend Roots in Middle East

Research documented in Nature suggests that dogs were first domesticated in the Middle East.

Studying gene segments from dogs and grey wolves (from which they evolved), research indicates dogs and wolves that come from the Middle East exhibit the most genetic similarity.

Research suggests that after domestication in the Middle East, dogs interbred with wolves when they reached East Asia, allowing for dogs and wolves to share some of their genetics.

What is Eye Color?

It may be man's most attention-grabbing quality, but what really is eye color?

In short, eye color is the expression of a combined number of genes. Eye color expression is like screwing in a certain color light bulb to emit a certain color of light. If you replace the bulb with a bulb of another color, the emitted light's color will change.

Eye color is not a blend of the parents' colors. Each parent has two pairs of genes on each chromosome, all of which can effect the ultimate color expression in a myriad of ways. Brown eye color is the dominant gene, needing only one copy to be expressed, while blue (recessive) requires both copy's. However, no one gene controls eye color - the OCA2 gene, controlling the amount of melanin pigment produced, accounts for ~74% of variation in eye color. Other genes effect the OCA2 gene's expression.

Geneticist Dr Rick Sturm states, "We believe ... there are two major genes - one that controls for brown or blue, and one that controls for green or hazel - and others that modify this trait". This means that brown-eyed parents can have a blue-eyed child, and vice versa.