While a battle over transgender rights plays out in Congress, GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — after being barred from serving on congressional committees for her past terroristic comments — is drawing attention to herself by going around saying, in effect, “boys are boys, and gir[...]
Posts Tagged ‘biology’
May 16th, 2019 - 12:47 pm § in Hypocrisy
False Advertising in the Era of Genomics
This is very irritating. As a biologist, I would buy this out of curiosity. However, I am skeptical that a low pass “full” genome sequence for ten bucks is as useful as a scan for SNPs and known markers. As a consumer, an add saying anything costs “9.95” ought not to mean $[...]
October 3rd, 2016 - 9:10 am § in Misc.
A Disappointing Nobel
A disappointing award. There are many more exciting discoveries in biology. This year’s Nobel in Medicine went to Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan. Professor Ohsumi won the award for his work on how cells destroyer their one parts, a process that is central to development and to aging. I was ver[...]
July 9th, 2015 - 1:02 am § in Misc.
HuffPost Interview: “So from a biological standpoint, it doesn’t seem to make much sense to use the term “race.”
There’s no doubt that different groups of people can look very different from one another. But to contemporary anthropologists and sociologists, the notion that there are distinct “races” of human beings, each with its own specific attributes, doesn’t make much sense. Dr. Mar[...]
February 26th, 2015 - 4:01 am § in Misc.
Pharyngula: Return of Superwater?
Has another Nobelist gone over the deep end? … from PZ Myers at Pharyngula: Luc Montagnier, the Nobel prize winning co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus, …. claims in several papers that the DNA of pathogenic bacteria emits an electromagnetic signal, and further, that if you[...]
December 10th, 2014 - 3:40 pm § in Hypocrisy
What is a Nobel Worth, Part II
Russian purchaser to give $4.75M Nobel medal back to DNA pioneer James Watson James Watson, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for the structure of DNA, will finally get his 23-carat gold Nobel medal back from the Russian purchaser who bought it for 4.75 million dollars. Watson’s medal went up fo[...]
July 9th, 2013 - 6:19 am § in Environment, Misc.
Are Polar Bears Really Irish?
Ancestry of polar bears traced to Ireland An international team of scientists has discovered that the female ancestor of all living polar bears was a brown bear that lived in the vicinity of present-day Britain and Ireland just prior to the peak of the last ice age — 20,000 to 50,000 years ag[...]
Sequencing Sasquatch!
Researchers at Oxford University and the Lausanne Museum of Zoology in Switzerland are asking yeti enthusiasts or anyone with samples thought to be from the creature alternatively known as Bigfoot or Sasquatch to share them for DNA analysis as part of the Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project, [...]
Need a Christmas Present? For $500 You Can Buy A Cloning Lab!
The quest for the $500 home molecular biology laboratory By John Brunstein, PhD ………. I recently set out on a quest to see whether a non-specialist, $500 complete molecular biology laboratory was possible. …….. The challenge I set for myself had a number of criteria: Tha[...]
November 23rd, 2012 - 10:42 am § in Misc.
Do Metazoan Mitochondria Cause Aging?
‘Selfish’ DNA in animal mitochondria offers possible tool to study aging Researchers at Oregon State University have discovered, for the first time in any animal species, a type of “selfish” mitochondrial DNA that is actually hurting the organism and lessening its chance t[...]