there might be a degree of cerebral inhibition in people that prevents them from damaging their muscular system that is not present, or not present to the same degree, in great apes.
Tag: biology
Stratosphere Bacteria
3 new species of bacteria, which are not found on Earth and which are highly resistant to ultraviolet radiation, have been discovered in the upper stratosphere.
Calling this “extraterrestrial” is a stretch, but still, good show, indian scientists!
The 10000 Year Explosion
Where the usual geographical analysis treats the distribution of genes as an effect of history, in their view, the genes themselves are a cause: 2 variants in the same gene do not necessarily have the same effect, and the relative selective advantages and disadvantages of them will influence the movements of genes through populations over both space and time.
The Inner Life of the Cell
wow.
Humans 8% retroviral
8% of the human genome is clearly retroviral. And microbial cells outnumber human cells 10:1 in our body. who are we?
Henrietta Lacks
Every single one of the cell lines Gartler was investigating, and countless others being used around the world, had been contaminated by HeLa cells. They had taken over every Petri dish of cells they had come near.
2014-06-10: A bit more on HeLa contamination
As we have more cell lines to work with and as we’re able to learn more about the molecular specifics that identify those cell lines, people are starting to go back and re-evaluate old research.
Not only is it becoming clear that results have been skewed by the use of less-than-ideal cell lines, in many cases, the scientists weren’t even using the cell lines they thought they were using. Instead, mistakes in the laboratory meant that cell lines got mixed up with one another. A common problem: Tough, fast-growing cells finding their way into a dish of weaker-growing cells, where they quickly take over. The dish is labeled as being one thing, but the cells now growing there are totally different. HeLa, the line of cells derived from the cervical cancer tumor of an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks, are infamous for invading test tubes all over the world. “You don’t even need sloppy lab technique. All it takes is for a droplet of HeLa to fall into another culture. Then it’s survival of the fittest and HeLa is very fit.”
Immortal jellyfish
Turritopsis Nutricula is able to revert back to a juvenile form through transdifferentiation once it mates after becoming sexually mature. Scientists believe the cycle can repeat indefinitely, rendering it potentially immortal.
Life Plausibility
the deep molecular biology of the cell actually fosters biological novelties when plants and animals need them most, not merely when random chance generates them.
Circos
Circos is flexible. Although originally designed for visualizing genomic data, it can create figures from data in any field—from genomics to visualizing migration to mathematical art. If you have data that describes relationships or multi-layered annotations of one or more scales, Circos is for you.
American Dream a Biological Impossibility
He paints a disturbing picture of 21st century American life, where behavioral tendencies produced by millions of years of scarcity-driven evolution don’t fit the social and economic world we’ve constructed.
Our built-in dopamine-reward system makes instant gratification highly desirable, and the future difficult to balance with the present. This worked fine on the savanna, but not the suburbs: We gorge on fatty foods and use credit cards to buy luxuries we can’t actually afford. And then, overworked, underslept and overdrawn, we find ourselves anxious and depressed.
That individual weakness is reflected at the social level, in markets that have outgrown their agrarian roots and no longer constrain our excesses — resulting in the current economic crisis, in which America’s unpaid bills came due with shocking speed.
But with this crisis, comes the opportunity to rethink how Americans live, as individuals and as a nation, and build a country that works.
let the deconstruction begin
Gregor J. Rothfuss 