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Cell Biology

Subway System Found in Immune Cells
September 20, 2002
The announcement of a “third form of intercellular communication” hit scientists like TNT: tunneling nanotubules, that is.  Science Now reported that “Scientists have found what appears to be a whole new way for immune cells to communicate with one another: long, narrow tubes that enable them to connect and exchange molecules.”  These subway tunnels between […]
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Cell Biology

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:  Let Darwin Take Over
August 20, 2002
Jack Szostak (Harvard Medical Center) wins this week’s prize for a comment in an Associated Press article (see PhysOrg) claiming that scientists will create life in a test tube within 10 years.  Szostak was explaining the process of creating a cell membrane to the reporter: His idea is that once the container is made, if […]
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Cell Biology

“Genomic Junk” Is Cell’s Air-Traffic Control
July 20, 2002
51; Linc-RNAs (large intervening non-coding RNAs) have been promoted from junk molecules to air traffic controllers.  A mystery about these transcripts of DNA that are not translated into proteins is being explained.     Science Daily reported on work at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and the Broad Institute that found these RNA molecules […]
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Cell Biology

Adult Stem Cells Lead Health Progress
July 20, 2002
51; Adult stem cells (AS) and induced pluripotent stem cells from adult tissues (iPS) continue to rack up tallies over embryonic stem cells (ESA).  Do we really need the embryonic variety?  Some continue to say yes, even though the practice of harvesting human embryos creates serious ethical questions for many. Controlling fate:  If you’d rather […]
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Amazing Facts

Harnessing Cellular Machines for Humans
July 20, 2002
The cell is loaded with molecular machines, so why reinvent the wheel?  or the whole truck?  Martin G. L. van den Heuvel and Cees Dekker wrote in Science that engineers ought to put the existing technology to work.1  The biological cell is equipped with a variety of molecular machines that perform complex mechanical tasks such […]
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Dumb Ideas

Media Becoming Ambivalent on How to Spin Evolution
June 20, 2002
Anti-evolutionists remain the whipping boys of science, but some reporters, at least, seem to be waffling on the effectiveness of the torture.  For others, the heat of the battle is apparently wearing them down.  Some even seem to be entertaining treasonous thoughts that the Darwinists are unable or unwilling to provide the promised reinforcements. Chimp […]
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Genetics

Something from Nothing Dept.: Can a Divide-and-Conquer Strategy Climb Mt. Improbable?
June 20, 2002
Darwinian evolution from the most primitive organisms to the most advanced must have produced huge increases in functional information (see 06/12/2003 entry).  Yet finding specific genetic mechanisms for just how DNA succeeded in “climbing Mt. Improbable,” as Richard Dawkins termed it in his book of the same name, has been daunting.  In a recent paper […]
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Cell Biology

Cellular Machines Coming to Light
May 20, 2002
51; As imaging techniques improve, cells are yielding up their secrets.  Scientists are getting closer to watching the processes in cellular factories in real time. Dynein:  PhysOrg reported, “Biologists capture cell’s elusive ‘motor’ on videotape, solving the mystery of its deployment.”  The article began, “Their experiments can be likened to restoring never-before-seen footage to a […]
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Amazing Facts

White Blood Cells Walk to Infection on Tiny Legs
May 20, 2002
51; How do white blood cells know where to go when infection strikes?  The cells have tiny little feet and crawl like millipedes, against the blood stream, if necessary, following signals from the infection site.  When they arrive, more signals tell them where to slip through the cells of the blood vessel to get to […]
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Amazing Facts

Genetics: Alternate Reading Frames May Be Common
May 20, 2002
Imagine a book written in a language where there were no spaces, and every word was three letters long.  Now imagine that you could get one story by starting at the first letter, and a different story by starting at the second letter, and another by starting at the third letter.  That’s the situation with […]
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Genetics

Large Individual Differences Seen in Human Genome
May 20, 2002
What makes each individual unique?  Nature1 reported a surprising thing about “the” human genome that is becoming apparent as more individuals’ genes are examined.  The first part is not surprising; the last part is: When the finished sequence of the human genome was unveiled last year, biologists said that it told a story of harmony […]
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Amazing Facts

Your Inner Postal Service
April 20, 2002
51; Zip codes – those five- or nine-digit numbers on mail – have an analogue in every one of your cells.  Like a city,1 a cell has information to ship from place to place.2  To make sure that the manufacturing instructions for protein parts arrive at the appropriate assembly site, the shipper puts a molecular […]
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Amazing Facts

Bacterial Flagellum Can Tune Its Swim Speed with Network-Controlled Brakes
March 20, 2002
51; What’s new with flagella?  These are the favorite toys of intelligent design supporters, because they are irreducibly complex molecular machines that evolutionists rarely attempt to explain by a Darwinian process.  More fodder for their position comes from a paper in Cell1 that finds that bacteria can fine-tune their swimming velocity by means of a […]
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