biology
oracknows | January 29, 2008In nondescript dressing room in a nondescript studio in a nondescript office building in in a nondescript industrial park, a short, pudgy 63-year-old man with the stereotypical demeanor of a particularly boring economist was trying to squeeze into a pair of shorts.
"Why oh why did I agree to do this?" he muttered in a whining drone.
He continued to struggle to get into the black shorts, virtually identical to the ones worn by English schoolboys and still worn by Angus Young of AC/DC on stage. Even though Young is over 50, somehow he managed to get into them, and so will I, thought the man.…
revere | January 29, 2008Since the antiviral agent oseltamivir (Tamiflu) has been touted as the global savior should a bird flu pandemic materialize the idea has been haunted by the specter of Tamiflu resistance. What if H5N1 becomes resistant to the drug? Is all lost? Now it is being reported in the media that the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention has found that the predominant circulating seasonal flu virus in Europe this year, H1N1, is showing an unexpectedly high rate of Tamiflu resistance (19/148 isolates tested). This is much more than what has been seen in the past and was from patients not…
razib | January 27, 2008Long time readers of this weblog will know I have an interest in Vitamin D. It has been hypothesized to be one of the major causal factors in generating human skin color variation, and we know from evolutionary genomics that the genes which underly skin color have been under very recent & powerful selection pressures. There is also data that Vitamin D levels may have a relationship to endemic diseases such as flu, and chronic ones such as arthritis. And then we find out nuggets such as the fact that most non-whites in Canada are Vitamin D deficient.
But what if we're putting the cart…
tqa | January 24, 2008
Over at Evolving Thoughts, John Wilkins has a post that criticizes a recently-published journal article. Normally, I agree with John - in fact, if it's true that the best measure of someone's intelligence is how often their views match yours, then John Wilkins is an absolute genius. But even Einstein had off-days, and (again, based on the agreement standard) I think this might have been one of John's.
The article in question, by paleontologists Sarda Sahney and Michael Benton, examines how long it took for ecosystems to recover after the end-Permian extinction. The dinosaurs weren't…
pontiff | January 18, 2008California company claims steps in human cloning. Witch burning outside of their laboratory to follow this evening.
revere | January 18, 2008In 2005 the world's bird flu doctors got together and pooled their meager knowledge about the epidemiology and clinical features of this zoonotic disase that has so far infected 350 people and killed 217 of them (latest "official" figures via WHO). In March of 2007 they got together again in Turkey and the New England Journal of Medicine (January 17, 2008 issue) has just published a joint report summarizing their discussion. Helen Branswell sets the stage:
The article, a review of data compiled on human cases to date, answers some questions about how the virus affects people. But it also…
oracknows | January 16, 2008It's been a while since I've dealt with creationists trying to claim either that evolutionary theory is not relevant to the problem of microbial resistance to antibiotics or, even worse, making really bad medical recommendations on the basis of their interpretation of evolution.
This time around RPM has posted a nice article on Competitive Release and Antibiotic Resistance that suggests a possible way that we can use evolutionary theory to prolong the useful life of antibiotics before resistance evolves. The results explained by RPM remind me of an article I blogged about several months ago,…
revere | January 16, 2008The host range of H5N1 is impressive: birds, of course; but also many mammals, including dogs, cats, stone martens, ferrets, mice, rats, humans. There are undoubtedly others. Cats are probably infected when they eat infected birds. Dogs? Not clear. Humans? Birds, other people on rare occasions. What else? In fact we know incredibly little about how various hosts are infected. Do cats spread it from cat to cat and dogs, dog to dog? How about cats spreading it to dogs and vice versa? Of course dogs to humans or cats to humans is an important topic. So it's good to see some studies looking at…
evolgen | January 14, 2008While much of the research in evolutionary biology is purely academic in nature -- designed for the purpose of understanding the biology of a system rather than for immediate human benefit -- there is some research that yields immediate practical uses. One research area that is particular fruitful in this regard involves applying evolutionary theory toward combating infectious disease agents. The metaphor of an arms race is often used to describe the evolutionary dynamics of parasites and their hosts. This true for the naturally evolved reactions in hosts, but also for human engineered…
jlynch | January 13, 2008
Scientists have discovered how two proteins called BERT and ERNI interact in embryos to control when different organ systems start to form. Apparently BERT binds to ERNI to unblock the transcription factor Sox2. Seriously.
The paper is over at PLoS Biology.
terrasig | January 13, 2008Leave it to PharmGirl, MD, to point me in the direction of a story that addresses the core theme of this blog: not only can medicines come from the Earth, but the Earth can itself be medicine. This time we're not talking about South Carolina "sandlappers" as detailed in my inaugural post here as authored originally at the old blog. (For newcomers, you'll get this gist if you also read, "Why Terra Sigillata?").
Instead, we wish to point your attention to a LiveScience article by Clara Moskowitz entitled, Why Chimps Eat Dirt. The practice of eating soil, known as geophagy, is common among…
oracknows | January 12, 2008I don't really care if this is cynical viral marketing or not. I don't even care that half the science blogosphere has picked it up (with no doubt the other half to pile on in the next few days). This is just so frikkin' brilliant that I'm going to join in, lemming-like, too, heedless of whether I'm being manipulated by Bio-Rad or not:
A higher quality video can be found here.
"PCR, When you need to know who the daddy is."
Best. Lyric. Ever.
omnibrain | January 12, 2008
The memory-evaluation study, headed by Dr. Franklin McCarroll of New York University's School of Psychology, revealed that approximately 47 percent of Jenkins' hippocampus is dedicated to storing notable video-game victories and frustrating last-minute defeats, while 32 percent of his amygdala contains embedded neurological scripts pertaining to game strategies, character back stories, theme songs, and cheat codes. In addition, his entire dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is devoted to remembering the time he did a helicopter dunk from half-court with Shawn Kemp at the buzzer to beat the…
tqa | January 11, 2008
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of…
evolgen | January 10, 2008There's a large element of "chance" in all biological systems. Whether it's a biochemical process within a cell, the movement of cells throughout an organism, or the evolution of the those organisms, stochasticity plays a large a part in biology. Unfortunately, this is often missed by most students of biology -- either because they fail to grasp the concept or it is never even presented to them.
Yann points us to an article in PLoS Biology on teaching students how to appreciate the importance of randomness (I prefer to call it stochasticity) in biology:
Klymkowsky MW, Garvin-Doxas K (2008)…
aardvarchaeology | January 9, 2008
Hey everyone, and welcome to the 96th Tangled Bank blog carnival! This is where you can toadally catch up with the best recent blog writing on the life sciences.
Beasties
Grrlscientist at Living the Scientific Life explains why bright blue tits make better mothers.
Tangled Up In Blue Guy gives us a run-down of the phylogeny of bioluminescent animals.
Podblack Cat describes her contribution thus
A brief look at taxonomy quirks(and you thought being famous had perks...) -Crypto-zoo claims,Real wacky namesAnd Seuss shows some science in his works!
Jeremy at Stand Up For REAL Science discusses…
tqa | January 8, 2008
Over the last couple of decades, a great deal of research has been done on the effect of global warming on coral reefs. The vast majority of that research has focused on the currently observed and potential future effects of climate change on reef-building corals. Coral, however, are not the only organisms that contribute to building a reef. A group of organisms known as the "coralline algae" also secrete calcium carbonate, and contribute to building up reefs. In a paper available online in advance of publication at Nature Geoscience, a group of researchers report on the results of an…
tqa | January 8, 2008
Today is the 185th anniversary of Alfred Russel Wallace. He's best known, of course, as the young(ish) scientist who, while recovering from malaria somewhere in Indonesia, independently came up with the same ideas about evolution that Darwin had been working on for three decades, wrote them up, mailed them to Darwin, and catalyzed the old boy into finally getting the damn book written. In fact, that part of his career is so well known that it's hard to find any mention of Wallace that doesn't also bring up Darwin. Despite his enormous talents as a naturalist, he's almost always cast as…
revere | January 8, 2008A new study from a glycobiology laboratory at MIT is creating a buzz in the flu community (see the MIT Press Release here). A great deal of molecular biology and virology studies what happens when the virus gets into a cell to use the cell's own machinery to make copies of itself. Glycobiology is a relatively new area, concentrating on the straight and branched chains of sugar units that make up a great deal of the "stuff" one finds outside of a cell. What do these sugars have to do with influenza?
In earlier posts (see here and here and links therein) we showed how the influenza virus…