Dave Smith

UK discount store Home Bargains famously sells a home paternity test kit that costs just £4.99. The kit contains a set of mouth swabs (one for the child, one for the potential father), consent forms, and envelopes used to send the completed kit to a UK testing lab. The company that produces the tests promise to analyse your samples and have your results ready the next working day, using cutting-edge DNA science.

On 6th June, 1944, allied forces undertook what became the biggest seaborne invasion in history. In what was known at the time as "Operation Neptune," 160,000 American, British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and other allied soldiers stormed a 50 mile stretch of heavily-fortified coastline in Normandy, in Nazi-occupied France, landing in amphibious craft and immediately coming under heavy fire. The operation has been re-imagined in countless movies, TV shows and video games—perhaps most famously in Steven Spielberg's 1998 film Saving Private Ryan.

Do transgender men and women carry genes that influence their gender identity? That's the basis of a new study by scientists from Augusta University in Georgia, who believe that there is genetic component to gender dysphoria—a condition where a person feels stress & anxiety due to a mis-match between their biological gender and their gender identity.

Three British MPs predict that cannabis will be made fully legal in the UK within the next 5-10 years.

You may have heard the often-quoted fact that humans and chimpanzees share 96% of their DNA in common. You also share 90% of your DNA with your cat, and a surprising 60% with a banana!

Analysing a person's DNA was once a difficult, time-consuming, and expensive task—reserved for the police, and performed in high-tech laboratories. But these days, you can pick up a home paternity test from a discount store for as little as £5 (plus a lab fee of around £100 for processing the samples). But can you really trust a cheap, at-home DNA test?