BiotechNews1

Identifying the mutations that underly unusual sleep traits can provide insights into the biology of sleep and circadian function in humans . Originally written by Sneha Khedkar, for The Sclientist, on Aug 25, 2025 |   Girl awakening at bed in morning. Child wake up early to go to school. Stretching and yawning. Healthy sleeping.   In the 1990s, a woman approached sleep neurologist Christopher Jones at the University of Utah with an unusual complaint. She would fall asleep very early in the evening and wake up for the day at 2AM . Her odd sleep schedule was preventing her from spending quality time with her loved ones. When she told Jones that some other members of her family experienced a similar sleep pattern , he suspected a genetic cause. Hoping to get some answers, he reached out to Louis Ptáček , a human neurogeneticist at the University of Utah . They suspected that the woman suffered from advanced sleep-phase syndrome : a condition where people find it difficul...

Genetic and anatomical data reveal how the human pelvis acquired its unique shape, enabling our ancestors to walk on two legs. Originally published by Katie Kavanagh , on   27 August 2025 All vertebrate species have a pelvis, but only humans use it for upright, two-legged walking . The evolution of the human pelvis, and our two-legged gait, dates back five million years , but the precise evolutionary process that allowed this to happen has remained a mystery. Now, researchers have mapped key structural changes in the pelvis that first enabled early humans to walk on two legs, and to give birth to babies with large brains and broad shoulders . The study , published in Nature on 27 August 1 , compared the embryonic development of the pelvis between humans and other mammals . They found two crucial evolutionary steps — related to the growth of cartilage and bone in the pelvis — that put humans on a separate evolutionary path to that of other apes. “Everything from the ba...