'Junk DNA' Debates Still Piling Up

March 5, 2015 | Carl Zimmer visits a pair of genetics labs as he digs into the ongoing arguments over whether our genome's vast tracts of noncoding DNA are mostly hangers-on contributing nothing to survival, or secret goldmines of new functional elements waiting to be discovered. While Zimmer turns up some exciting recent discoveries about regulatory RNA and gene expression, in the end proponents of a fully functional genome still need to show their theories can pass the "onion test." New York Times