Reading the UK newspaper, the Telegraph, I see that social networking sites can be bad for your moral values. Scientists say so, so it must be true… Only they didn’t, & it’s not. Ben Goldacre has picked up on this story (along with other examples of overblown reporting in the UK press). The paper on which […]
Continue readingMonth: April 2009
more on epigenetics & imprinting
Grant is a regular commenter here & occasionally I’ve twisted his arm & persuaded him to write a guest post for me. The following item is one of these – it was too good (& too long!) for the comment thread. Grant begins: Alison recently put up an article about epigenetics. Since I was in […]
Continue readingmore epigenetics – imprinting
A little while back I wrote about epigenetics – & I’ve got a nice piece from Grant to put up for you too. But in the meantime – PZ has written about genetic imprinting, another example of how modification of the chromatin can affect gene expression. And he’s included some nice diagrams of how it […]
Continue readingan entertaining look at our family tree
Horrakapotchkin! It seems that hsi is no longer available – something t do with a ‘terms of use violation’. I do hope the problem – whatever it is – is cleared up as this really was rather cool. ______________________________________________________________________________ and a useful introduction to some of the terminology used in phylogenetics. (Courtesy, as usual, of […]
Continue readingben goldacre’s missing chapter
I’m a big fan of Ben Goldacre’s – I read his coliumn regularly & thoroughly enjoyed his recent book, Bad Science. Except for the missing chapter – when the book was published, Ben was engaged in a court battle over the content of that particular part of the book. Anyway, that’s over, Ben (& the newspaper […]
Continue readinglet’s clarify something here
You see some interesting things in the ‘letters’ pages of our local newspapers. A little while ago it was the suggestion that ‘stabilised liquid oxygen’ was the cure for all ills. This week: a statement that the recently-introduced Gardasil vaccine contains rat poison & aluminium, and that it’s caused 29 deaths and 10,000+ adverse reactions. […]
Continue readingopposable thumbs
On my recent epigenetics post, Heraclides pointed me in the direction of an article about polydactyly in cats. It contains the comment that these cats are also known as mitten or thumb cats because they can learn to pick up things, open latches or move objects with near-human dexterity. Well, OK, we had a cat who was […]
Continue readingmultilingual bacteria & glowing squid
Did you know that there are more bacterial cells on & in your body, than there are cells that are ‘you’? Well, there are. And those bacterial cells don’t live in isolation, endlessly dividing & dividing & dividing… They communicate with each other. (I did know that, having read Carl Zimmer’s wonderful book Microcosm – but not […]
Continue readinganother request – this time it’s stem cells
This time, the daughter tells me, she’s doing a project on a ‘current issue’ – & she’s selected stem cells. Current, controversial, contentious – & extremely interesting. But again, I’m not an expert (although my colleague Bjorn Oback, at AgResearch, is doing some very interesting work in that area & in fact received a Kudos award […]
Continue readingMore on the nature of science
and the nature of open-mindedness (via Pharyngula [as usual!]). Remember to turn the sound on.
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