Genetic factors can only explain the difference in life expectancy of 16% of individuals.

Did you forget your mother's birthday this year? Cheer up: Your family tree may now include the birthdays of 13 million people.
Yaniv Erlich, a computational biologist at Columbia University in New York, and his colleagues used crowdsourced data to create a family tree that connects 13 million people.
this chart of ancestors is considered the largest proven resource of its kind - spanning an average of eleven generations.
researchers report the findings in the March 1 issue of the journal Science.
Erlich's team analyzed the dates of birth and death of members of the family tree and calculated whether the age of death of an individual would be similar if they were closely related.
the team concluded that genetic factors can only explain the 16 percent life difference in these individuals.
most of the differences can be attributed to other factors, such as people's lifestyle and where they live. "It's a real trip," said Braxton Mitchell, a genetic epidemiologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore,
.
"It's a good example of interesting research using large, open data sets, " he says.
"Scientists have long suspected that the environment has a greater impact on people's longevity than genes."
but Erlich estimates that genes play a smaller role than researchers previously thought.
some studies, such as those published in 2001 by Mitchell's team, estimate that genes determine a quarter of the change in human life expectancy.
Erlich's findings prove the power of genealogy or genealogy, said Lisa Cannon Albright, a geneticist at the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City. "These resources will be a powerful area of future genetic research," said
Albright.
erlich points out that the "good" gene can extend a person's life span by an average of five years.
and some environmental factors can have a greater impact on life expectancy, for example, smoking can reduce life expectancy by 10 years.
geneticists have long used family history to study the effects of genes on many traits, such as disease risk.
, however, building a database of household archives with a large population can be expensive and laborious.
Erlich's team's research is one of many ongoing ways to collect digital records into very large family records;
Erlich's research used data from Geni.com, an online genealogy tool.
he is the chief scientific officer of Geni's parent company, MyHeritage in Yehuda, Israel.
the analysis is based on data from about 86 million people uploaded by Geni users.
that was an order of magnitude higher than the participants in the largest consumer genetic test database. "The sheer number of participants is crazy," said Atul Butte, a computational genomics scientist at the University of California, San Francisco,
.
", he said, "you can only get such a data set through crowdsourcing."
it's really impressive.
Erlich's team used these data to analyze the migration and marriage patterns of participants on Geni's list.
, for example, the researchers found that before 1750, most Americans and Europeans in the database were married to people up to 10 kilometers from their birthplace.
and by 1950, most Americans and Europeans had to travel at least 100 kilometers from their hometowns to find a mate.
in other words, your parents may have gone further than their ancestors to build your family.
at least you should remember their birthdays.
.