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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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Genetics

Evolution to the Rescue for Abused Ape
April 5, 2007
The UK Guardian reports that Austrian courts are being asked to grant human status to an ape to allow it to sue a company for importing it into Austria for medical research.  In 1999, New Zealand granted “non-human hominid” status to apes to protect them from maltreatment, but this case attempts to give full human […]
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Bible and Theology

Have Scientists Found the Secret of Aging?
March 17, 2007
There’s a tragic disease that speeds up aging.  Known as progeria (Huntington-Gilford progeria syndrome, HGPS), it is caused by a single point mutation in exon 11 of the NMLA gene.  Children afflicted with this disease look old beyond their years and often die at 13 of heart attack and stroke – essentially, of old age. […]
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Amazing Facts

Cell Calcium Channel: Meet Me at the Gate
March 16, 2007
All cells use calcium ions for signalling.  The ions flow through specialized gates in the plasma membrane.  Inside the cell, receptors line the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), a kind of subway system where finishing work on proteins is done.  How do the two get together?  They arrange a meeting.     Richard Lewis, writing in Nature,1 […]
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Birds

Evolutionary Predictions Fail Observational Tests
March 8, 2007
Lately, some expectations by evolutionists have not been fulfilled.  Here are several recent examples of evolutionary upsets: Dinobird genes cook up scrambled eggs:  Scientists expected that the dinosaurs presumed ancestral to birds would show a decreasing genome size.  The thinking was that the cost of maintaining a large genome takes its toll on flight.  In […]
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Amazing Facts

Watch a Ribosome in Action
February 21, 2007
A remarkable article about a remarkable machine: that’s what Chemical and Engineering News has published about the ribosome, a molecular machine vital to everything alive in the world.  Stu Borman’s article lavishes praise on the details of this assembly-line factory that translates RNA into proteins.  He surveys the history of investigation into the ribosome’s secrets.  […]
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Genetics

Blind Cave Fish: Can Darwinism Be Credited for “Regressive Evolution”?
February 16, 2007
It is a worldwide phenomenon that cave creatures go blind.  Some cave fish lose their eyes entirely; in others, the eyes shrivel and lose function.  In many cave fish, scale pigmentation also changes.  Are these gradual modifications due to natural selection, Darwin’s mechanism of evolution, or to genetic drift?  Darwin himself could not see any […]
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Origin of Life

OOL on the Rocks
February 15, 2007
Robert Shapiro demolishes the RNA World just in time for Leslie Orgel to demolish Shapiro's own myth. Ashes, ashes; they all fall down.
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Amazing Facts

Cells Perform Nanomagic
February 13, 2007
The cell is quicker than the eye of our best scientific instruments.  Biochemists and biophysicists are nearing closer to watching cellular magic tricks in real time but aren’t quite there yet.  They know it’s just a trick of the eye, but it sure is baffling how cellular machines pull off their most amazing feats.  Think, […]
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Cell Biology

Contingency and the Structure of Life’s Building Blocks
February 6, 2007
Some Yale scientists found they could construct protein-like molecules using amino acids of a type not found in living things.  They found that beta-amino acids can fold into shapes similar to the proteins made of alpha-amino acids used in living things.  Beta-amino acids have an extra carbon on the backbone.  “Yale chemists show that nature […]
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Amazing Facts

Cells Perform Sporting Interactions
January 31, 2007
The components of living cells perform such acrobatic moving interactions, one would think they are having fun.  Here’s the news from the Wide World of Cellular Sports. Speedway:  A news release from Penn Medicine talks about how motor proteins step on the gas and the brakes in their motions around the cell.  The announcer from […]
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Amazing Facts

Cell Quality Control Runs a Tight Ship
January 31, 2007
Without the surveillance and rapid response of quality control, cells would collapse and die.  Here are some recently-published examples of nanoheroes in action. Plant checkpoints:  Picture a child watching the wonder of a seedling breaking through the soil into the light for the first time.  Within hours, the ghostly-white stem turns green, and a day […]
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Amazing Facts

Cell Membrane Has Ticket-Operated Turnstiles
January 27, 2007
Cells are like castles surrounded by walls.  A wall without gates, however, would prevent commerce and trap the inhabitants inside.  The cell has ingenious gates that control the flow of goods and services through its outer membrane under tight surveillance and quality control.  This controlled flow, as opposed to passive diffusion or osmosis, is termed […]
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