biology
revere | July 19, 2006It's not news the nation is having a heat wave although it is making the news, as temperatures in the nineties and above were reported in city after city, from one coast to the other and in between. Good opportunity to talk physics and physiology.
Your body is a prodigious producer of heat, which you can see just by thinking about the food you consume. To be charitable to you and your lack of gluttony, let's say you consume 2500 Calories a day. A Calorie is a measure of the chemical energy released in the form of heat when the organic material in the food is burned. These are large calories (…
evolgen | July 16, 2006Here is some light reading for your Sunday:
Mosquitoes sing to each other by flapping their wings. This paper reports sexually dimorphic responses to wing beat patterns in mosquitoes (PZ Myers has a good review). This leads me to wonder whether we can study intra- and inter-specific differences in flight behavior and response, which then gets me wondering whether we can find QTLs responsible for these differences. And (this should come as no surprise to those who know me) I also wonder whether these QTLs will map to within inversions for sympatric species pairs more so that allopatric…
purepedantry | July 15, 2006Surgeons are experimenting with ways to use cryogenics to aid in surgery. If you can put someone in suspended animation, it would make the process of surgery much easier. Here is a description from Wired Magazine about such an experiment in a porcine test subject:
"Make the injury," Alam says. Duggan nods and slips his hands into the gash, fingers probing through inches of fat and the rosy membranes holding the organs in place. He pushes aside the intestines, ovaries, and bladder, and with a quick scalpel stroke slices open the iliac artery. It's 10:30 am. Pig 78-6 loses a quarter of her…
jlynch | July 14, 2006
This one-pound lobster that was caught in Maine apparently is missing pigment on one half of its body. Quote at end of the story: "Lobsters are interesting but not personable."
evolgen | July 13, 2006At one point in my life, I wanted to study conservation genetics. Now, I just make fun of molecular ecologists and their flawed data. The most recent installment of Ask A ScienceBlogger takes me back to the days before I discovered the wonders of genomics:
Is every species of living thing on the planet equally deserving of protection?
Before I answer the question (or avoid answering the question) allow me to say a couple of things. First of all, this question would be much easier if it were rephrased, "Should we target any particular species for extinction?" If that were the question, my…
scientificactivist | July 12, 2006When I saw this earlier today, I knew I had to write a post on it. So, even though Afarensis beat me to it, I'm going to do it anyway.
I just love this article from the BBC. It sounds kind of like what an elementary school student would write if he or she was suddenly endowed with professional writing abilities: it doesn't hold back any of its excitment, and it uses terms like "killer kangaroo" and "flesh-eating marsupial" in lieu of more formal scientific names:
'Killer kangaroo' evidence found
Palaeontologists digging in northern Australia have found fossil evidence of several new…
evolgen | July 12, 2006The genome encodes all of the RNAs and contains sequences responsible for the transcription of those RNAs and the proper folding and wrapping of the cromosomes. The RNAs encoded by the genome are collectively known as the transcriptome. The transcripts that are translated into proteins represent the proteome or the ORFeome (depending on the context).
I'm fascinated by the growing list of "-omes" out there. Genomics and proteomics appear to be the most established "-omics" disciplines, but a new paper in PNAS has introduced me to an "-ome" with which I was previously not familiar: the…
purepedantry | July 10, 2006That will teach 'em:
Social contact helped the Ebola virus virtually wipe out a population of gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo, French researchers reported on Monday.
A 2004 outbreak of the virus, which also kills people, killed 97 percent of gorillas who lived in groups and 77 percent of solitary males, Damien Caillaud and colleagues from the University of Montpellier and the University of Rennes in France reported.
Overall, it wiped out 95 percent of the gorilla population within a year, they reported in the journal Current Biology.
"Thousands of gorillas have probably…
evolgen | July 10, 2006I've missed the last two Ask A ScienceBlogger questions. My lack of answers were due to a combination of being busy and apathy toward the questions -- more busy with the science education question and apathy for the science policy question. But this week's question is on cloning, so I kind of feel obligate to post a response (being a genetics blog and all) despite not really being interested in the topic. So, they're asking us:
On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to?
Ten years ago, I was in…
scientificactivist | July 10, 2006This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question is:
On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to?
In short, my answer is yes. Although the number of species of mammals cloned has increased, slowly but surely, nobody is cloning their dead relatives yet. No surprise there. In 2006, though, cloning for cloning's sake isn't where it's at. Instead, the future of cloning lies in its applications to biomedical research. Today, that means, among other things, the prospect of using cloning to generate…
razib | July 8, 2006Charles Lumsden's Of Biocultural Mathematics and Mind is too long for me to summarize in my half roused state. Nevertheless, I suspect some of you will find it of interest....
purepedantry | July 4, 2006You remember what you learned in biology right -- or maybe health. A woman is born with all the eggs she will ever have. Well some researchers in Australia are disputing that point.
By doing stereology on mice aged 1 to 200 days they claim to show that the overall number of eggs does not decline. Stereology is the science of accurately counting cells in a tissue.
The trouble is that I don't buy it.
Here is the abstract (the article requires a subscription):
Proliferation and partial meiotic maturation of germ cells in fetal ovaries is believed to establish a finite, non-renewable pool…
evolgen | June 17, 2006If you want to find an image on the internet, you can usually find a relevant picture using Google's Image Search. But the Google search matches text, not the image. Glyn Moody points us to a cool new plan which will allow you to search images on the web using images. This idea sounds awesome, and I wish them the best getting it off the ground.
This reminded me of something I've been hearing about for the past couple of years. Those of you with an ear to the ground in the Drosophila bioinformatics community (yeah, all five of you) are familiar with Sudhir Kumar's FlyExpress program. Kumar and…
terrasig | June 15, 2006Janet's post on The New York Times breast-feeding article reminded me that I had a related post in the hopper that I had drafted at the old blog back in May. I wrote it following PZ Myers' beautiful and scholarly repost from classic Pharyngula on the human breast milk and the origin of the word galaxy. As is all too common with me, my comments there were longer than most folks' blog posts, so I'll reproduce them here:
While reviewing the literature when my wife was breastfeeding, I was amazed to learn of the other beneficial compounds present in breast milk beyond the nutrients [Prof Myers]…
evolgen | June 13, 2006This one goes out to all the kids who don't drink. By kids, of course, I mean our wonderful readers -- spoken to in a condescending manner -- not minors. I would never encourage minors to drink. That's illegal, and everything that is illegal is bad. Real bad.
A paper in the pipeline at Cancer Letters reports that xanthohumol, a chemical found in Hops, possesses some anti-tumorigenic effects in prostate cells. Hops are one of the main ingredients in beer, so I will now be using the excuse that BEER CURES CANCER whenever I wake up in the morning with a nasty hangover. Take note beer drinkers,…
revere | June 13, 2006Time out for a bit of infectious disease terminology. The words pathogenic, virulent and transmissible get tossed around a lot when talking about the bird flu virus and the possibilities of a pandemic. They are sometimes used interchangeably. They aren't interchangeable, however, and their differences are important to understanding talk about bird flu.
Let's start with one other term, the pre-requisite for the other three, infectivity. Viruses are bits of genetic material and associated proteins that do essentially one thing and one thing only: make copies of themselves. That's it. They aren'…
jlynch | June 8, 2006I need help identifying this large fly that was on my patio last night (the orange color is due to the porch light, click for bigger version). It was maybe an inch in body length. Any ideas?
Update: Below the fold, I give what may be an identification.
Kevin Christie, a PhD student at the University of Illinois in the Neuroscience program, sent me the following via e-mail:
I'm currently doing fieldwork in central Missouri, with colleagues at the University of Missouri - Columbia, and out in the woods, have seen several insects that resemble your picture. After speaking to an entomologist (…
evolgen | June 6, 2006I've learned that writing about alcohol is great for the ol' site meter. Even the teetotalers got active in the comments. Despite the rampant sobriety that seems to be spreading amongst sciency types, I still believe that alcohol is the lubricant that greases the scientific process.
But scientists -- being scientists -- aren't just interesting in drinking the alcohol; they also want to know where the critters that make it come from and how it gets produced. Of course, alcohol on its own isn't very enjoyable. That's why beer makers add things like hops to their brew, and wine makers try to…
evolgen | June 3, 2006John Hawks' really needs to permit comments on his blog. I mean, without comments, is it really a blog? I bring this up because this post really belongs in the (non-existent) comments of this post from Hawks. Hawks discusses this article on human gut flora fauna microbes.
According to the article, we are superorganisms that depend on our gut microbes to assist us in digesting food, much like these guys. We get a lot of our intestinal buddies when we pass through the birth canal, and we pick up others throughout life (see here for more on intestinal microbes). The worms that are attached to…
oracknows | June 1, 2006Via a fellow SB'er , I find this video by the Protane Clan. It's so-well....--unusual that I thought my readers might find it interesting (and maybe even entertaining), even though the actual rapping is kind of lame. If you've already seen this thanks to The Daily Transcript, feel free to move on. Otherwise, check it out and tell me what you think!
I'm not sure that this is the greatest way to be teaching protein synthesis...