Personal genetics companies are fitting in well with the post-Thanksgiving Day consumer frenzy in the US. Well, maybe not so much of a frenzy in this slow economy, more like mild agitation. 23&me are having a sale, your genotype for $99 (+ 1 year subscription, etc, comes out to $159). You can get your genotype, [...]
If you entered this post to comment the error in the title, then I have one word for you. Gotcha! Yes, “warm blooded” animals are not, really, warm blooded. After all, a lizard in the baking sun has a core temperature higher than most mammals, but it is still called “cold blooded”. So-called cold blooded [...]
I’m at College Station airport, Texas, waiting for my delayed flight and hope that the weather in Dallas lets up within the hour. A good time to take a break and blog. College Station is the home of Texas A&M University, which is a place I am always happy to visit. The scientists here are [...]
Yes, it’s that time when we all get together in front of the screen to watch another beautiful game played by that fantastic team contributing to the Carnival of Evolution. This time hosted on the lovely green pitch of Byte Size Biology. So get your popcorn, sunflower-seeds, crisps or any other culturally-appropriate sports-watching food and…… [...]
The first article in the Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results (JSUR) has been published. Reminder: “JSUR is an open-access forum for researchers seeking to further scientific discovery by sharing surprising or unexpected results. These results should provide guidance toward the verification (or negation) of extant hypotheses.” (From the JSUR website.) I posted about JSUR before here and [...]
It isn’t junk DNA: God just commented out a lot of crappy code as he rolled out releases. – An old bioinformaticians’ joke (Hey, I never said it was a funny joke…) Why are some genomes so big? I mean, seriously. Why would the marbled lungfish with a genome weighing 132.83 picograms (pg) need an [...]
The 29th edition of the Carnival of Evolution will be hosted here. There are quite a few good things in store: on parrot feathers and lizardfish eyes, on Darwin cartoons, on dogs, dancing and much more. You can still contribute. So if you are a blogger with a post on evolution, go to the blog [...]
Warning: somewhat NSFW language.
This seems very promising: two consecutive workshops on biological Wikis in Naples. If you have a life-science related wiki, plan on doing one, or just want to learn about how collaborative authoring can help your work, this would be a great place to do so. Thanks to Paolo Romano for the information. Joint NETTAB 2010 [...]
Sometimes I get the feeling that all life on Earth basically serves as a vehicle for viral replication and propagation. Viruses thrive in all three domains, they embed themselves in all creature’s genomes, they may lie dormant in the genome for eons or decimate whole populations in a few years, and they are the most [...]
Archaea are under-rated. For one, most people don’t really know they exist – and if they do archaea are thought of as a type of bacteria. This goes not only for the general public also for some of my non-microbiology colleagues. (I had to correct quite a few “archaeobacteria” utterances.) The discovery that Archaea are a [...]
No, not a new hunter-killer drone, neither is it the n+1 installment in the sci-fi horror series. Rather, Myxococcus xanthus. Again. M. xanthus is a highly cooperative bacterium, as we have already seen: when starved, most cells “commit suicide” while a few form spores, to survive the lean times. But M. xanthus also [...]
I have written before about bacterial cooperation, and how cheating works, up to a point, in an environment of bacterial cooperation. That post talked about bacterial quorum sensing, the collective signaling mechanism by which bacteria construct supra-cellular structures called biofilms. Biofilms are tough multicellular enclosures that allow bacteria to survive and thrive in hostile environments, [...]
Previously on our show: ‘ Homology is Not a Quantitative Term‘. Homology is a drop-in replacement for the “common ancestry”. It does not make any sense to say “low common ancestry” “high common ancestry” “micro common ancestry” or (egads!) “70% common ancestry”. You cannot be 70% homologous any more than you can be 70% pregnant. [...]
