CVK
(Thanks to Anna Uma Morgan for this one!) The New York Times Magazine had a short article about the fact that geneticists are using the Muggle/non-Muggle to explain heredity:

This summer, the journal Nature published “Harry Potter and the Recessive Allele,” a letter that argued that J. K. Rowling’s tales of the young wizard Harry Potter offer an opportunity to educate children in modern theories of heredity.

As almost everyone above the age of 3 knows, the Harry Potter novels depict a world divided into people who possess magical powers (wizards and witches) and those who do not (Muggles). Not everyone can be a wizard; indeed, after careful review of the evidence, the authors of the Nature letter concluded that wizards evidently inherit their gifts from their parents as predicted by the theories of the 19th-century geneticist Gregor Mendel…