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Early Man

The Chimp-Human 1% Difference: A Useful Lie
June 29, 2007
Jon Cohen made a remarkable admission in Science this week.1  The popular notion that humans and chimpanzees are genetically 99% similar is a myth, and should be discarded.  Since 1975, textbooks, the media and museums have emphasized this close similarity; but now, Cohen quoted a number of scientists who say the number cannot possibly be […]
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Cell Biology

Crisis at Both Ends of Darwin’s Tree
June 21, 2007
Two assumptions about evolution – one about the earliest multicellular organisms and one about the rise of mammals – have run into trouble.  Eukarya sans Mechanista:  “In the absence of direct evidence, science should proceed cautiously with conjecture,” wisely advised Anthony Poole and David Penny in Nature.1  They scorned the researchers who glibly invent fables […]
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Cell Biology

Could Germ Toxicity Be an Environmental Effect?
June 15, 2007
Listeria becomes nasty when starved of oxygen, reported EurekAlert.  “Limiting oxygen produces bacteria up to 100 times more invasive than similar bacteria grown with ample oxygen supplies.” Could this imply that a world with different atmospheric or soil conditions could have been less prone to disease?  Could the bacteria we fear most have been placid […]
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Genetics

Genome Complexity Unveiled: No Junk, Only Function
June 15, 2007
Any remaining doubts that the idea of “junk DNA” has itself been junked should vanish under the latest findings about genome complexity.  A number of recent news stories have revealed astonishing levels of regulation and organization in the non-coding regions of DNA.  It turns out that genes are not the only interesting things in the […]
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Cell Biology

No More Need for Embryonic Stem Cells?
June 6, 2007
Harvesting human eggs and creating embryos for embryonic stem cells may soon become a thing of the past.  Nature Science Update reported that four teams have verified that normal skin cells in mice can be reprogrammed to act identically to embryonic stem cells.     The technique, called “induced pluripotent stem cell” (iPS), holds promise […]
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Genetics

Origin of Multicellularity: Back to the Drawing Board
June 1, 2007
Micro-RNAs have been found in green algae.  So?  What’s the big deal?  If you read the statements in Nature,1 it sounds like evolutionary biologists consider it a big, bad deal: The discovery, made independently by two labs, dismantles the popular theory that the regulatory role of microRNAs in gene expression is tied to the evolution […]
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Amazing Facts

Molecular Motors Move You
May 30, 2007
The realization that cells are filled with molecules that move like machines fascinates many people.  Students who grew up thinking of chemistry as bouncing molecules that did little more than link up and separate have a whole new paradigm to consider: molecules that walk, fold and unfold, spin and operate like ratchets, robots, wrenches and […]
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Astronomy

Think Fast: News Briefs
May 21, 2007
Of the many news items that cross the CEH desk, many are noteworthy but go unreported due to lack of time.  Here are a few that deserve honorable mention lest they pass into oblivion. Cosmology: Dark future – Several sources like Science Now and Space.com commented on the dark future of the universe if cosmic acceleration […]
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Amazing Facts

Details of Photosynthesis Coming to Light
May 9, 2007
New tools of science are unveiling the secrets of what was long a “black box” in biology: photosynthesis.  A paper in Nature last week1 described the structure of the plant PhotoSystem I complex (PSI) in near-atomic resolution.  Next day, a paper in Science2 described some of the protein interactions that occur when plants turn light […]
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Genetics

New Theory for Introns: Mutation Sponges
May 8, 2007
When you don’t know where damage will occur, it makes sense to spread the assets around.  Scientists from City of Hope Medical Center (a cancer care and research institute) have a new idea about introns, those regions of DNA “junk“ between the more interesting exons (parts of genes).  Perhaps the introns are mutation sponges.   […]
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Genetics

New Genes Don’t Fit Mr. Darwin
May 1, 2007
If evolutionists predicted the wealth of new data from genetics was going to fall nicely into an evolutionary picture of Darwin’s tree of life, nature has foiled them again.  Ancestral patterns are blurred by unexpected findings, such as the following: Little giants:  Small, simple.  Large, complex.  That’s the old high-school picture of genetic evolution, but […]
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Education

Human Adaptation Can Be Rapid
April 25, 2007
How long does it take for humans to adapt to environmental changes?  Some recent papers investigated this question. Paleface:  If it is assumed that humans started out medium or dark-skinned, how long did it take for Europeans to lose much of that original pigment?  An article in Science April 20 says maybe just 6,000 to […]
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Genetics

More “Candy” Found in Junk DNA
April 24, 2007
Powerful regulators that play a crucial role – this is how non-coding sections of DNA are now being described.  A story in Science Daily says that these regions of “junk DNA” once dismissed as “gene deserts” actually orchestrate the expression of genes during development.     In a related paper in PNAS,1 researchers found regulatory […]
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Amazing Facts

Fatty Acid Synthesis: A Machine with “High Degree of Architectural Complexity”
April 19, 2007
As Bruce Alberts said in 1998, the biology of the future was going to be the study of molecular machines: “the entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines.”1  One of those machines is […]
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Genetics

Mutation Rate Catastrophe: You Can’t Even Break Even
April 9, 2007
In a tortoise-and-hare kind of story, a team of geneticists figured out what happens when positive natural selection tries to outrun mutations: “mutation rate catastrophe.”  Publishing in PNAS,1 they described how beneficial mutations might become established in a population rapidly (that’s the hare).  Eventually (this is the tortoise), harmful mutations accumulate to the tipping point, […]
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