An intriguing DNA project from Oxford and Harvard researchers promises, "We’re analysing DNA from ancient and modern humans to create a ‘family tree of everyone’"

According to information on the project's web site:

Did you know that it’s now possible to sequence all of your DNA for about the cost of a smartphone? This will reveal your unique genetic makeup, and can be used to work out the similarities and differences between yourself and other people around the world at a genetic level.

But how can you make sense of this information, and what does your genetic variation tell you?

In our research group at Oxford University’s Big Data Institute, we think the key to understanding this is held in our ancestry, and in particular in the genetic genealogy that relates us all. This describes how you and everyone else have inherited different parts of your genome from different ancestors. If we could learn this genealogy and decipher where and when they lived, we could uncover all of the history written in our genes – how our ancestors moved around the world and the evolutionary processes that created us all.

This sounds like a Herculean task. Without the genomes of everyone who ever lived, what could we possibly know about people who lived thousands or hundreds of thousands of years ago?

We’ve approached this task by devising a series of elegant computer algorithms which take genetic similarities and differences in a dataset of many individuals, and accurately reconstructs relationships among them.

Unifying modern and ancient genomes

Building on this approach, in our new research we describe the story of recent evolution among 215 diverse human populations from varying times and geographic locations.

The genealogy – lines of descent from our common ancestors – includes the genomes of 3,601 people from three separate datasets, as well as eight high quality ancient genomes. These came from three Neanderthals (an extinct human subspecies who lived in Eurasia until around 40,000 years ago), a Denisovan (another human subspecies more recently discovered from a shard of bone found in a Siberian cave), and a family of four humans from the Afanasievo culture who lived 4,500 years ago in south Siberia.

The unified genealogy, or “family tree”, explains the genetic relationships of these thousands of genomes to one another.

You can read the entire article at: https://bit.ly/3RpkoYX.

AWA, whose goal is to preserve global memory and cultural heritage for future generations, is an initiative of the Norwegian company Piql, which collects and stores its partners’ contributions in a secure vault repository set deep in a decommissioned coal mine in Svalbard, Norway, just some 600 miles from the North Pole.

Designed to withstand natural and man-made disasters, in the safest location on earth, data stored here will last for centuries. Much of our heritage is stored digitally and, despite best efforts to protect it for the future, it can be exposed to risks, either from the online environment or just from the limits of modern storage technology. The combination of resilient long-term storage technology and the remote, safe and cold conditions found on Svalbard, enables data to live on into the distant future.

Established in 2017, the Arctic World Archive (AWA) holds an impressive collection of valuable digital artefacts and irreplaceable information from around the world, with over 15 contributing nations.

AWA is home to manuscripts from the Vatican Library, political histories, masterpieces from different eras (including Rembrandt and Munch), scientific breakthroughs and contemporary cultural treasures.

You can read a lot more in the AWA web site at: https://arcticworldarchive.org/.

Archivists in Torreyson Library at the University of Central Arkansas have recently digitized more than 1,000 historical photographs. The collection, which can be accessed here, includes buildings, social activities and student life dating back to the school’s beginning in 1907. 

The process has taken several months and interim archivist Daniel Klotz says this is just a start. His office has been collecting images since 1986 and is constantly acquiring more photos to digitize. 

“Our goal is to make the collections more accessible,” Klotz said. “With this project, anyone can find a photograph by typing in keywords. So if someone is interested in what student life looked like in the 1920s, they could click on ‘students’ and see all the photos of come up.” 

The UCA collection has dozens of categories which include buildings, group and individual shots, residence halls, music, athletics and several others. Klotz scans each photo (some of which are on glass plates) and adds captions and metadata to each image. 

You can read more at https://bit.ly/3y8weQx.

Geneanet has a special offering to American and German non-Premium members: free access from October 1-6 (inclusive) to the web site's German collections and Genealogy Library (books & newspapers).

October 3 is Tag der Deutschen Einheit (Germany Unity Day), a national holiday since 1990, which celebrates the reunification of Germany at the end of the Cold War. And October 6 is German-American Day, when 40 million Americans celebrate their German heritage.

As Sean Daly, the U.S. Community Manager at Geneanet described it: We call our event "Ahnenfest" which means "Ancestor Festival". It's a different kind of Oktoberfest!

Here is the announcement from Geneanet:

Here are some interesting facts to ponder:

According to a research study by Pew Research, circulation of newspapers peaked in the late 1990s at over 62 million with an advertising revenue of nearly $50 billion. Fast forward to 2020 — circulation is barely reaching 24 million, and advertising revenue has declined to just over $9 billion. Translation: more people read newspapers today than ever before, except for the fact that they are now reading electronic print, not print on paper.

More video was uploaded to YouTube in the last two months than all the video broadcast by ABC, NBC, and CBS combined since 1948.

Wikipedia was launched in 2001. Since then this online encyclopedia has grown to more than 6 million articles in the English version alone, far more than any encyclopedia ever printed on paper.

In February, 2008, U.S. presidential candidate John McCain attended numerous campaign fund raising activities and raised $11 million. During the same time, his competitor, Barack Obama, attended no fund raising activities at all and raised $55 million from online social networks.

The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful and about a hundred thousand times smaller than the one computer at MIT in 1965.

The computer that used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket, what fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years.

And here's the statement that got me thinking: The mobile device is now the world's primary connection to the Internet.

The following announcement was written by Findmypast:

Less than a year after raising seed funding from Milwaukee venture capital firm Gateway Capital Partners and relocating from Madison to Milwaukee, health data technology startup Geno.Me (pronounced "genome") is ready to go to market.

Geno.Me is a data exchange platform that connects researchers with anonymized health data and pays consumers who opt to share their own medical and genomic records from sites like Ancestry.com and 23andMe. The company has raised a total of $400,000 (U.S.) in funding over 1 round. This was a Seed round raised on Nov 11, 2021.

It is a data exchange platform that links a person’s genetic report with their electronic health records.

The company’s platform connects electronic health record data with genomic information from services like 23andMe, MyChart and Ancestry.com in hopes of furthering medical research. Individuals who share their data with the platform are compensated on a monthly basis, while the business promises them total privacy and anonymity.

These linked datasets are encrypted and sold to companies conducting precision health research and developing pharmaceuticals.

Geno.Me was founded by Britt Gottschalk, a management consultant who has worked in health care, insurance and business communications.

The company was just launched and there isn't much information about it available online. You can see the limited information that has already been published at https://www.yourgeno.me/. However, I suspect we all will hear more about Geno.Me before long.

From an article by Bryan Grabauskas published in the wibw.com web site:

The legacy of a former Kansas judge is helping others leave their mark.

The Kay McFarland Japanese Garden played host to the launch of “Lasting Legacy Online.”

It is a website allowing users to log their own life stories to share with their loved ones.

Funding provided through the McFarland Living Trust will help preserve stories forever and keeps it free to use.

“You are able to upload documents, photographs, songs, recipes; anything that is of value to you and that you want to continue to pass on to your family and friends,” said Shawn Wesner, Communications Expert for Lasting Legacy Online. “This is the website where you can do it all.”

Details may be found at: https://bit.ly/3UOroBA

After finding documents revealing new family history, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer made a trip to Auschwitz on a journey of reflection and discovery. You can watch this documentary in a YouTube video at: https://cnn.it/3E80heW

A federal judge has thrown out a class action lawsuit against Ancestry.com before lawyers could get it to trial.

Chicago's Judge Virginia Kendall on Sept. 16 granted summary judgment to the company, which was accused of violating the Illinois Right of Publicity Act when it published old yearbook photos without permission to advertise its pay service.

Kendall had already thrown out claims under Illinois' Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act in late 2021.

Plaintiffs lawyers failed to work around what Kendall determined was the IRA's one-year statute of limitations by arguing each payment Ancestry made to a company that licenses yearbook names and images started the statute over.

"But Ancestry derives no financial benefit by paying another company; the licensing agreement is an expense incurred by the company, not a profit from the use of someone's image," she wrote.

"Ancestry never republished or reused (the plaintiff's) image in these transactions. These payments were simply a routine part of the company's business."

You can read more in an article by John O'Brien published in the Legal Newsline web site at: https://bit.ly/3dP9gXV.