As they say in the real estate business, location is everything. It looks like the same working principle applies to genes and their control sequences in the genome during embryo development. And not just the gene’s simple location in a linear sense, but its three-dimensional spatial location.

One of the key arguments of human evolution has now suffered the same fate as many other debunked icons of the errant paradigm of "junk DNA." In this case, it is new research related to the beta-globin pseudogene—which now shows it to be functional and important to hemoglobin gene regulation.

The word "fail" usually implies that something went wrong. To fail a school exam decreases the chances of passing the course, and failing a physical exam portends poor health. But when scientists studied yeast and bacteria that "fail to optimize" the production of certain proteins, they discovered that's actually a very good thing.