The human genome is a rich, complex record of migration, encounters, and inheritance written over thousands of millennia. In this month of love, amid

By now, it’s firmly established that modern humans and their Neanderthal relatives met and mated as our ancestors expanded out of Africa, resulting in a substantial amount of Neanderthal DNA scattered throughout our genome. Less widely recognized is that some of the Neanderthal genomes we’ve seen have pieces of modern human DNA as well.

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses that embedded themselves into our genetic code ...

Researchers have used a new human reference genome, which includes many duplicated and repeat sequences left out of the original human genome draft, to identify genes that make the human brain distinct. (Getty Images) What makes the human brain distinctive?

Veronica Paulus is a former STAT intern supported by the Harvard University Institute of Politics. Complex regions of the human genome remained uncharted, even after researchers sequenced the genome in its entirety. That is, until today. Researchers ...