4
POPSEngineered Rabbit Penises Raise Human Hopes Clipped for the headline. No doubt this will be all over the web. How is the Catholic Church on this sort of tamponing, I mean tampering, with nature. Probably for it. Help the population grow beyond the planet's ability to cope.
15
POPSFree Lectures and Courses... This was clipped some time ago by someone to whom I add thanks. Newer clippers may find it interesting. I've detailed the astronomy items as that is what I was searching for.
5
POPSSperm Whale Classified Carbon Neutral Prior analysis of whale carbon dioxide emissions attributes 25 percent of carbon dioxide emissions total to the animals in the Southern Ocean region. Subsequent computation lowers the whales’ carbon dioxide emissions estimate to 0.3 percent, which is equivalent to 17 million tons of carbon a year. Lavery and team explain that there are low levels of iron in the Southern Ocean, and the sperm whales each contribute about 10 grams of iron to the surface. Since the iron comes from the whales’ waste material, it takes the form of liquid plumes, effectively acting as a fertilizer and encouraging growth of plankton. Depending on the exact values and environmental conditions, sperm whales can then be classified “either a net carbon sink or as carbon-neutral,” Discovery writes.
3
POPSScientists Create New Life Form to Clean Up Water "We're kind of making a new machine," said Dan Tarjan, a senior majoring in biology at University of Virginia. The live machine is to be entered in The International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, which will be held Halloween weekend at MIT. The annual competition is built on the premise that life can be broken down into a warehouse of off-the-shelf, interchangeable parts and reassembled into creatures that have never existed. Over 100 teams will use synthetic biology (similar to genetic engineering) to show that DNA building blocks (BioBricks) don’t have to come from nature and can be designed and built from standardized parts that behave predictably. The hope is that these tiny factories will produce clean biofuels, powerful new medicines and environmental pollution sponges. Good luck to all contestants.
2
POPSGarlic can help prevent colds, evidence indicates More: While many people opt for garlic supplements, others prefer to increase the garlic in their diets. Many home chefs mistakenly cook garlic immediately after crushing or chopping it, says Dr. David W. Kraus, associate professor of environmental science and biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. To maximize the health benefits, you should crush the garlic at room temperature and allow it to sit for about 15 minutes. That triggers an enzyme reaction that boosts the healthy compounds in garlic.
6
POPSGenome-wide study of autism published in Nature "The biggest challenge to finding the genes that contribute to autism is having a large and well studied group of patients and their family members, both for primary discovery of genes and to test and verify the discovery candidates," said Aravinda Chakravarti, professor of medicine, pediatrics and molecular biology and genetics at the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins, and one of the study's senior authors. "This latest finding would not have been possible without these many research groups and consortia pooling together their patient resources. Of course, they would not have been possible without the genomic scanning technologies either."
28
POPSThe Possibility of Impossible cultures Heuser suggests that only humans have evolved four computational capacities, constituting a phylogenetic mind gap between humans and other animals. An important perspective, go read all of it
26
POPSThe DNA Mystery: Scientists Stumped By "Telepathic" Abilities Even so, research published in ACS’ Journal of Physical Chemistry B, shows very clearly that homology recognition between sequences of several hundred nucleotides occurs without physical contact or presence of proteins. Double helixes of DNA can recognize matching molecules from a distance and then gather together, all seemingly without help from any other molecules or chemical signals. This recognition effect may help increase the accuracy and efficiency of the homologous recombination of genes, which is a process responsible for DNA repair, evolution, and genetic diversity. The new findings may also shed light on ways to avoid recombination errors, which are factors in cancer, aging, and other health issues.