New Zealander Antiques Dealer Claims Harry Potter Castle
A Napier (New Zealand) antiques dealer has claimed that his family are the rightful heirs to one of Britain's most famous dynasties, which owns the castle used in the Harry Potter movies.Kevin Percy, 74, believes his family was cheated out of inheriting the Earl of Northumberland's massive estate, now conservatively valued at $685m.
He has started a bold bid asking British authorities, including the Queen, to exhume the bodies of two suspected relatives for DNA tests, which he says would prove or disprove his claim. The two men died in 1560 and 1716.
His bid targets one of Britain's most celebrated noble families, which dominated the Middle Ages. The earldom owns nearly 50,000 hectares of land in Britain.
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The study shows that Mexicans mate according to proportions of Native American to European ancestry, while Puerto Ricans are more likely to settle down with someone carrying a similar mix of African and European genes.
The Sankofa Project was launched at the 
Researchers from the University of La Laguna (ULL), the Institute of Pathology and Molecular Immunology from the University of Porto (Portugal) and the Institute of Legal Medicine from the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) have studied the Y chromosome from human dental remains from the Canary Islands, and have determined the origin and evolution of paternal lineages from the pre-Hispanic era to the present day. To date, only mitochondrial DNA has been studied, which merely reflects the evolution of maternal lineages.
The British "Royal Disease," a blood disorder transmitted from Queen Victoria to European royal families, is a striking example of X-linked recessive inheritance. Although the disease is widely recognized to be a form of the blood-clotting disorder hemophilia, its molecular basis has never been identified, and the royal disease is now extinct. 
Colleen Fitzpatrick, who drives a dented Camry and rocks a pet parrot to sleep each night, is not one to brag. But if pressed, she'll tell you, over lemonade and bananas from her tree, "I can find anybody in the world."
Today's Scandinavians are not descended from the people who came to Scandinavia at the conclusion of the last ice age but, apparently, from a population that arrived later, concurrently with the introduction of agriculture. This is one conclusion of a new study straddling the borderline between genetics and archaeology, which involved Swedish researchers and which has now been published in the journal Current Biology.
The remains of 250 soldiers killed at the Battle of Fromelles in northern France have been recovered after a four-month archaeological operation.
DNA tests will begin this week on the remains of hundreds of British and Australian soldiers killed in the First World War's Battle of Fromelles. 
Genetic research indicates that Australian Aborigines initially arrived via south Asia. Researchers have found telltale mutations in modern-day Indian populations that are exclusively shared by Aborigines.
There are no signs of a massacre--no mass graves, no piles of bones. Yet more than a million men vanished without a trace. They left no descendants. Historians know that something dramatic happened in England just as the Roman empire was collapsing. When the Anglo-Saxons first arrived in that northern outpost in the fourth century a.d.--whether as immigrants or invaders is debated--they encountered an existing Romano-Celtic population estimated at between 2 million and 3.7 million people. 
The efforts to identify the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), found under the cathedral in Frombork, was made in a collaborative project between Swedish and Polish scientists in a team consisting of archaeologists, anthropologists and geneticists. The results is published this week in the journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).
The current population of Tuscany is not descended from the Etruscans, the people that lived in the region during the Bronze Age, a new Italian study has shown.
Imagine donating a sample of your DNA to help researchers study the genetics of diabetes. The disease is common among your friends and family, and you're proud of your role in finding out why. Now, imagine that some time later, you learn that your DNA has been used for other studies on topics you never expected — schizophrenia, human migration, inbreeding. Although your name isn't attached to the sample anymore, scientists are using your DNA to draw conclusions about your community and your ancestors. Some of these studies violate your cultural beliefs.
First it was Oprah Winfrey's wistful reach for the continent, now other prominent African Americans are finding their roots.
Google revealed in a regulatory filing that it has invested another $2.6 million in 
Every year, construction workers or farmers churning up the soil of Western Europe unearth the bodies of a handful of Canadian troops killed in the two world wars. Even after their skeletal remains are found, though, the servicemen's identity often stays a mystery.
Egyptian researchers are using DNA tests to discover the lineage of pharaoh king Tutankhamun, whose ancestry remains a mystery to Egyptologists, antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said on Monday.
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