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Discovery of DNA - Nobel Prize winners James Watson and Francis Crick are not the ones who discovered DNA, contrary to popular belief. In reality, DNA was first identified by Swiss chemist Friedrich Miescher in 1869.

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Chemical building blocks - DNA is made of four building blocks: the nucleotides adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T).

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Genome - An organism's complete set of DNA, with all of its genes, is called a genome. A human genome contains no less than three billion base pairs of DNA.

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Typing the human genome - Imagine typing 60 words per minute and doing so eight hours a day. It would take you around 50 years to be able to type the entire human genome.

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201,000 pages - Our entire genome would fill 201,000 pages worth of Yellow Pages!

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Risk of disease - DNA can help predict a person's inherited risk of disease such as breast cancer and heart disease.

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DNA affected by environment -

A person's environment has an influence on their DNA. While it doesn't completely change it, it does affect the way the genes work. This is the reason why, for instance, some people are hairier or darker than others.

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Gene mutation - Changes in genetic information are called mutations. Changes in an organism's DNA can lead to changes in all aspects of its life.

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What causes gene mutation? - A lot of factors can cause a gene mutation: environmental forces such as UV radiation from the sun, tobacco, chemicals such as drugs, and so on.

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Red blood cells -

Most of the cells in your body contain DNA, except for red blood cells, due to the lack of nuclei and organelles.

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How to extract DNA? - There are different ways to extract DNA: cheek cells, blood, and urine.

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Wildlife forensic - DNA is also used in wildlife forensic science for solving wildlife crimes and identifying the poachers.

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30 trillion cells - We have around 30 trillion cells in our bodies and 200 different types of cells.

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To the Sun and back - If it was possible to stretch all the DNA in a human's body out, there would be enough DNA to go to the Sun and back more than 300 times. Mind you, the sun is 150 million km (93 million miles) away from the Earth!

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To the moon and back - If you could stretch the DNA in all the cells out, they'd be able to make over 9,000 trips to the Moon and back!

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Passed from parent to child - Half the DNA of a child is inherited from each parent. This means that each parent passes half of their DNA to their child through sexual fertilization.

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99 percent - Every human shares 99% of their DNA with other human beings, but a parent and child share 99.5%.

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Twins - Identical twins or monozygotic twins are 100% genetically identical.

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Fingerprints - Even though identical twins share 100% of their genes, they don't have identical fingerprints. However, since their identical genes give them very similar patterns, their DNA is virtually indistinguishable. This basically means that if one identical twin leaves his DNA at a crime scene, it would be impossible for a crime lab to dissociate the two of them.

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Perfect crime - German police could not solve a jewelry heist even after finding DNA at the crime scene. The DNA evidence matched two identical twins, but since they both denied the crime and because it was impossible to link the DNA to one of them, they walked free.

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Caviar - DNA testing is not only used for humans, but also to authenticate food such as fine wine or caviar, to distinguish legal caviar from the illegal.

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Cabbage - Humans share about 40-50% of their DNA with cabbage.

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Banana - Humans and bananas share 50% of their DNA.

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Chimpanzees - Humans share 98.5% of their alignable DNA sequence with chimpanzees.

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Living hard-drive - DNA is more efficient than any hard-drive you could possibly think of. Harvard scientists have been able to store around 700 terabytes of data into a single gram of DNA.

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Different DNA -

In rare cases, it happens that one person has two different sets of DNA. For instance, when an embryo absorbs its own twin in the womb.

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Chimera - People with two different sets of DNA are called human chimeras.

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Not reliable - DNA evidence can be unreliable in a courtroom for various reasons. One reason is the so-called "secondary transfer" or "accidental transfer," in which an innocent man's DNA could be found at a crime scene after shaking hands with the criminal.

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DNA damage - The DNA undergoes up to one million damaging events per day in every cell of the body. This damage is repaired thanks to the repair proteins sent by the cells. In case of failure, the cells might be destroyed or converted to cancer cells.

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Ancient viruses -

Eight percent of DNA is made of ancient viruses that used to infect humans.

See also: Weird things that happen to your body when you die

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