Basic Biology
clock | July 1, 2010Last week, my SciBling Jason Goldman interviewed me for his blog. The questions were not so much about blogging, journalism, Open Access and PLoS (except a little bit at the end) but more about science - how I got into it, what are my grad school experiences, what I think about doing research on animals, and such stuff. Jason posted the interview here, on his blog, on Friday, and he also let me repost it here on my blog as well, under the fold:
Here at Thoughtful Animal headquarters, we're starting a new series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal…
clock | June 6, 2010Reposted, as I needed to add a few of the most recent posts to the list - see under the fold:
Now that this blog has won the ResearchBlogging.org Award in the Biology category, people are coming here and looking for biology posts. And on a blog with almost 10,000 posts, they may not be easy to find. So, I put together a collection of posts that I think are decent under the fold. Different lengths, styles, topics, reading-levels - hopefully something for everyone:
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)
Why social insects do not suffer from ill effects of…
clock | March 26, 2010Now that this blog has won the ResearchBlogging.org Award in the Biology category, people are coming here and looking for biology posts. And on a blog with almost 10,000 posts, they may not be easy to find. So, I put together a collection of posts that I think are decent under the fold. Different lengths, styles, topics, reading-levels - hopefully something for everyone:
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)
Why social insects do not suffer from ill effects of rotating and night shift work?
Some hypotheses about a possible connection between malaria…
clock | February 13, 2010Last night, braving horrible traffic on the way there, and snow on the way back, I made my way to the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences for the Darwin Day shark lecture co-organized by NESCent and the sneak preview of the Megalodon exhibit which officially opens today.
I have to say that the trip was very much worth making - the exhibit is excellent! I like the way the exhibit is making good use of the space - so many exhibits feel cluttered and an all-out assault on all of one's senses. Upon entering the room, it looks quite sparse. Yet, once I started going around I saw how much it actually…
clock | November 2, 2008The list is now final. Here are the top 13:
#13 Deep-sea corals
#12: Yeti Crab
#11 Venus's Flower Basket
#10: Echinothuriid Sea Urchins
#9: Bathynomus, the GIANT ISOPOD!!!!
#8 Red Lure Jellyfish
#7 Predatory Tunicates
#6: Giant Sea Spiders
#5 Barreleye Fish
#4 Gold-Footed or Scaly Foot Snail
#3 Flesh Eating Sponges
#2: Bone-Devouring Zombie Worms from Hell
#1 Vampire Squid
clock | November 2, 2008An Evolutionary Look at Sperm Holds Secrets of Mobility, Fertility:
The fusion of sperm and egg succeeds in mammals because the sperm cells hyperactivate as they swim into the increasingly alkaline female reproductive tract. One fast-moving sperm drives on through the egg's fertilization barrier.
Mammals have sperm with a tail that reacts when calcium ions enter a microscopic channel in the tail and make the sperm go into overdrive. In fact, four genes are needed to produce the so-called CatSper ion channel in the sperm tail that hypermotivates the sperm. The CatSper genes may someday be…
clock | October 23, 2008 Time Lapse Of The Embryonic Development Of Drosophila Melanogast - Watch the top videos of the week here
clock | September 8, 2008Olivia Judson is back in action on her blog, with a very interesting new post: Braking the Virus:
However -- and this is where the opportunity to rewrite genes comes in -- there is more than one way to specify most of the amino acids. Glutamine, for example, can also be written as CAA. Arginine can be written in six different ways; proline, in four. The reason for this is that the genetic code has a great deal of redundancy. Although there are 64 possible codons (4 different nucleotides for each of three positions), there are only 20 amino acids to be assigned to them. This means that the…
clock | August 4, 2008Alex, Dan and John Wilkins have wise things to say about metaphors in biology, Big Biology and a recent article by Sir Paul Nurse.