All Posts (782)

Corals, Already in Danger, Are Facing New Threat From Farmed Algae

I had always been aware that both pollution and agricultural practices have been threatening our coastal ecosystems for some time now. Even so, reading the Pulitzer prize-winning series of articles in the LA Times, Altered Oceans, really opened my eyes to just how widespread and dangerous the situation is becoming.

An article appearing today in the New York Times discusses how the farming of… Continue

Added by Kelly Lagor on July 8, 2008 at 2:18pm — No Comments

Personalized Medicine a Possibility?

In the era of genomics, the idea of personalized medicine is becoming more of a reality. Through the increasing affordability and speed of high-throughput sequencing coupled with the increasing use of genomic data to identify for alleles linked to disease, the idea of having your feet printed as well as having your genome sequenced at birth isn't so much as science fiction as science fact.

From the feature article in Nature Biotech:

"Personalized medicine—'the right drug… Continue

Added by Kelly Lagor on July 8, 2008 at 2:08pm — No Comments

50 Cancers to be Sequenced

The causes of cancer are many and varied, which makes finding the best course of treatment for individuals difficult outside of broad sweeping approaches like chemo. The International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) wants to sequence 50 different types of cancer in order to better understand their idiosyncrasies.

The Nature Biotechnology article (By Henry Nicholls):

"The recent launch of the ...ICGC looks set to flood DNA databases with unprecedented genomic detail on up… Continue

Added by Kelly Lagor on July 8, 2008 at 2:01pm — No Comments

The Population Bomb: how a 40-year-old perspective still holds water

An article appearing this week in Current Biology looks back on The Population Bomb - a book written in 1968 by biologist Paul Ehrlich.

From the article:

"Ehrlich chose to emphasise the simple biological challenges posed by rising populations. And he was strident: 'It cannot be overemphasised', he wrote, 'that no changes in behaviour or technology can save us unless we can achieve control over the size of the human population. The birth rate must be brought into balance… Continue

Added by Kelly Lagor on July 7, 2008 at 4:29pm — No Comments

Platypus Genome Suggests a Recent Origin for the Human X Chromosome

New evidence that the sex chromosomes of the platypus are not homologous to human sex chromosomes implies that evolution of these chromosomes occurred after the placental mammal/monotreme split 165 million years ago.

From the article's introduction:

"Almost all organisms reproduce sexually. Given the ubiquity of this mode of reproduction, in particular among animals, one might think that dioecy — having separate males and females — and the molecular mechanisms behind sex… Continue

Added by Kelly Lagor on July 7, 2008 at 4:21pm — No Comments

Genomics: Annotating with proteomes

Research by UCSD undergraduates was recently highlighted at Nature Reviews Genetics. The students used high-throughput tandem mass spectrometry in order to better annotate genomic data, forging a new field called "proteogenomics."

From the article:

"The more genome sequences we have, the greater the need for accurate and efficient annotation. Proteomics offers a way of doing this that guarantees accuracy — if a protein is detected, then there must be a gene that encodes… Continue

Added by Kelly Lagor on July 7, 2008 at 12:49pm — No Comments

Artificial DNA Could Power Future Computers

Here's a neat little article about the applications of artificial DNA. While short, the links in the article are satisfying.

From the article:

"...Masahiko Inouye and colleagues at the University of Toyama used stitched together four entirely new, artificial bases inside the sugar-based framework of a DNA molecule, creating unusually stable, double-stranded structures resembling natural DNA, they say.

Like natural DNA, the new ripoffs were right-handed and some… Continue

Added by Kelly Lagor on July 7, 2008 at 12:30pm — No Comments

Using Prozac to Understand Depression

Recent research advances have discovered how Prozac treats depression, and even accounts for the lag following onset of treatment before individuals begin to feel better.

From the article:

"In recent years, scientists have developed a novel theory of what falters in the depressed brain. Instead of seeing the disease as the result of a chemical imbalance, these researchers argue that the brain's cells are shrinking and dying. This theory has gained momentum in the past few… Continue

Added by Kelly Lagor on July 7, 2008 at 11:51am — No Comments

The Story of Stuff

This is a very well made and informative video that should be passed around to get the message across about how big of consumers we are and how this affects our environment, global warming, and society.

Below is a teaser video but I recommend checking out the the whole video at the their website: www.storyofstuff.com.

From their website:

What is the Story of Stuff?

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all… Continue

Added by ScholarNexus, LLC on June 30, 2008 at 7:00pm — No Comments

<i>E. coli</i> and You

The NYT book review this weekend covers the new book by Carl Zimmer, Microcosm: E. coli and the new science of life.

From the article:

"Along with some more familiar material, Zimmer vividly describes the unfamiliar microscopic world of E. coli and their tightly packed, rod-shaped bodies: 'If you prick us, we bleed, but if you prick E. coli, it blasts.' And unlike mammals, bacteria often swap genetic material, placing limits on Monod’s dictum. However, species large… Continue

Added by Kelly Lagor on June 30, 2008 at 12:15pm — No Comments

Green Sci-Fi from Bacigalupi's 'Pump Six'

From NPR's Weekend Edition:

Sci-fi writer Paolo Bacigalupi uses real environmental science as a starting point for his stories. His collection, called Pump Six, describes a near future where massive droughts create a black market for calories.

You can listen to the interview at NPR here.

Added by Kelly Lagor on June 30, 2008 at 12:09pm — No Comments

Government Seeks Dismissal of End-of-World Suit Against Collider

I've been following this story for a while now since it truly is the stuff of science fiction.

From the NYT article:

"In the lawsuit, filed in March in Honolulu district court, Walter Wagner, a retired radiation safety expert who lives in Hawaii, and Luis Sancho, a Spanish science writer, contended that the Large Hadron Collider could create microscopic black holes that could wind up eating the Earth, or other dangerous particles known as strangelets — a sort of contagious… Continue

Added by Kelly Lagor on June 26, 2008 at 6:18pm — No Comments

Nature Book Review: In Pursuit of the Gene

From the review at Nature.com:

"Many histories of genetics cover the same ground. What distinguishes Schwartz's account is his impeccable scholarship, based on many primary sources, and his ability to keep the narrative moving, interweaving discoveries with the strong and eccentric personalities who made them. He does not slight the science, describing experiments in detail so dense that the reader is advised to keep a pencil and paper handy. The effort required to understand the… Continue

Added by Kelly Lagor on June 26, 2008 at 3:22pm — No Comments

Fossil of most primitive 4-legged creature found

A 365-million year old fossil of a primitive, water-dwelling creature may shed light on how sea-based creatures evolved into land-based ones.

From the LA Times article:

"While an earlier discovery found a slightly older animal that was more fish than tetrapod, Ventastega is more tetrapod than fish. The fierce-looking creature probably swam through shallow brackish waters, measured about three or four feet long and ate other fish. It likely had stubby limbs with an unknown… Continue

Added by Kelly Lagor on June 26, 2008 at 2:54pm — No Comments

Huge genome-scale phylogenetic study of birds rewrites evolutionary tree-of-life

A new study by the Field Institute of Chicago is promising to shake up everything we know about the evolutionary tree of life.

From the press release:

"For more than five years, the Early Bird Assembling the Tree-of-Life Research Project, centered at The Field Museum, has been examining DNA from all major living groups of birds. Thus far, scientists have built and analyzed a dataset of more than 32 kilobases of nuclear DNA sequences from 19 different locations on the DNA… Continue

Added by Kelly Lagor on June 26, 2008 at 2:46pm — No Comments

UCSD Student Creates Software That Can See You Smile

Jacob Whitehill, a computer science PhD student, has developed software that can detect a person's facial expressions, and use that information to control video playback.

You can watch a video demonstration of this technology here.

Applications of this work would be for computer-learning applications, where students are being taught by a robot.

"If I am a student dealing with a robot… Continue

Added by Kelly Lagor on June 26, 2008 at 2:00pm — No Comments

New and improved? Novelty drives choice behavior

New research suggests that novelty drives choice behavior in humans, even when the degree of familiarity with an option is completely unrelated to choice outcome. The research, published by Cell Press in the June 26th issue of the journal Neuron, reveals fascinating insights into the brain mechanisms that underlie the tendency to explore, and even value, unfamiliar options.

Here's the abstract:

"The desire to seek new and unfamiliar experiences is a fundamental behavioral… Continue

Added by Kelly Lagor on June 25, 2008 at 5:32pm — No Comments

Climate change threatens two-thirds of California's unique plants, study says

An article in the LA Times reports on a recent paper in PloS on how climate change in California may be threatening local flora.

From the article:

"California's flora face a potential 'collapse,' said David Ackerly, an ecologist at UC Berkeley who was the senior author of the paper. 'As the climate changes, many of these plants will have no place to go.'

Half of the plant species that are unique to the continental United States grow only in the Golden State,… Continue

Added by Kelly Lagor on June 25, 2008 at 5:18pm — No Comments

Neuro-Liberalism

With this fall bringing about one of the most closely followed presidential races in modern history, political-themed books are selling like hotcakes. The new book, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century Politics With an 18th-Century Brain by George Lakoff, a linguist and cognitive scientist at Berkeley, examines how the political right wins and keeps power.

From the NYT article:

"The basis of Lakoff’s theory is simple: the mind is the brain. Any… Continue

Added by Kelly Lagor on June 25, 2008 at 5:15pm — No Comments

An answer to the Martian Hemispheric Dichotomy

Three letters appearing in Nature this week describes how the oblong nature of Mars may be explained by a giant collision millions of years ago - very much like the way the Moon was created from the Earth.

One abstract:

"The most prominent feature on the surface of Mars is the near-hemispheric dichotomy between the southern highlands and northern lowlands. The root of this dichotomy is a change in crustal thickness along an apparently irregular boundary, which can be… Continue

Added by Kelly Lagor on June 25, 2008 at 5:08pm — No Comments