it’s not a miracle

From time to time the media present us with reports of ‘miracles’: the most recent is probably that of the 9-year-old Dutch boy who was the sole survivor of a plane crash in Libya. Frankly I would have thought it more miraculous if everyone on board had survived… But anyway, ‘miracles’ are often presented in […]

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sequencing the neandertal genome

I’ve had this one in my ‘must write about’ file for a little while: in the May 7th edition of Science, a large research team announced that they’d produced a draft sequence of Neandertal DNA (Green et al. 2010). Using DNA from 3 individual Neadertals, the multi-institutional team managed to decipher more than 4 billion nucleotides from […]

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