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Amazing Facts

How Cells Proofread DNA Is Still Mysterious
June 29, 2009
An amazing fact about DNA transcription is that the machinery not only copies DNA onto RNA, but checks it for errors.  A story in Science Daily says that researchers would expect 100 times more errors statistically than the actual results of transcription in the cell.     One of the mechanisms revealed in more detail […]
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Amazing Facts

Cells Use Cloud Computing
June 19, 2009
“Cloud computing” is the up-and-coming trend in information technology.  It allows processes to run in parallel on multiple networked processors with more robustness, because other processors can pick up the slack if a major server fails.  Scientists are finding that cells have been using this technology all along.     Science Daily reported on work […]
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Genetics

Darwinizing Sex Causes Pain
June 15, 2009
Sex brings pleasure to many, but pain to Darwinists.  Why?  Because they can’t figure it out.  Nick Lane is a case in point.  In New Scientist, he wrote, Sex is the ultimate absurdity.  Forget the hormonal rushes, the sweat and the contorted posturing.  Forget about the heartache, the flowers, the bad poems and the costly […]
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Genetics

Animals Become Tame with Minor Genetic Changes
June 9, 2009
“In what could be a breakthrough in animal breeding, a team of scientists from Germany, Russia and Sweden have discovered a set of genetic regions responsible for animal tameness,” began a report in Science Daily.  Groups of tame rats and aggressive rats were bred separately, then mated.  Scientists identified genetic regions responsible for the different […]
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Biomimetics

Discovering Health and Technology in the Human Body
June 7, 2009
Why invent technology from scratch, when the body contains substances that point the way to high tech, and can heal almost like magic?  Several articles show that harnessing the body’s own resources is the wave of the future.     Umbilical cords were usually tossed into the maternity ward biowaste can, but now they are […]
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Amazing Facts

World’s Smallest Rotary Engine Highlighted
May 25, 2009
The smallest rotary motor in the world keeps your body humming.  It also keeps bacteria, plants, polar bears, giraffes, salmon, sea urchins and just about everything else humming.  It’s a nano-wonder called ATP synthase.  This molecular motor has been reported many times in these pages, but not recently; what’s new?  The state of our knowledge […]
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Cell Biology

Scientific Data Can Mislead
May 4, 2009
Some recent stories should remind scientists that data do not exist in a philosophical vacuum.  Sometimes empirical measurements can be downright misleading. Pillars of creation:  The famous Hubble photo of the Eagle Nebula’s “pillars of creation” seemed to have a straightforward explanation: nearby stars were eroding the pillars with blasts of radiation.  Scientists have been […]
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Cell Biology

Who Needs Embryonic Stem Cells?
May 3, 2009
Cells can be “reprogrammed” to act just like embryonic stem cells, a Nature stem cell blog called The Niche reported.  This eliminates the need to use viruses or inserted DNA to induce the cells to become pluripotent.  The resulting cells are “morphologically indistinguishable” from embryonic stem cells, the article said.     The prior week, […]
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Cell Biology

Evolving Complexity
April 21, 2009
Anyone analyzing a scientific explanation should evaluate whether it explains the phenomenon or explains it away.  For instance, to say that bats have sonar because they evolved it provides little in the way of understanding of how or why that happened.  Recently, some scientific papers have directly addressed the topic of complex systems in biology.  […]
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Cell Biology

Is Horizontal Gene Transfer a Force for Evolution?
April 13, 2009
Two more genomes were published last week: the information libraries of two tiny microbes.  They are members of Micromonas, green algae less than two microns across.  The original paper and summary both bragged about how the genetic information is helping shed light on evolution, but did the data really contain any light?  If so, the […]
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Cell Biology

Evolutionary Explanations: Substance, Seasoning, or Storytelling?
April 7, 2009
A scientific theory should explain why certain phenomena in nature are the way they are.  This layman’s view, though simplistic, expects that a theory should also predict new phenomena before they are observed.  In many science reports on evolution, however, one finds evolutionary theory tacked on as an explanation after the fact, when the theory […]
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Genetics

Natural Selection Studies Based on Bad Statistics
March 30, 2009
Hundreds of studies claiming to show natural selection may be wrong, say scientists from Penn State and Japan.  PhysOrg reported today that “several statistical methods commonly used by biologists to detect natural selection at the molecular level tend to produce incorrect results.”  Many studies of human evolution have relied on these flawed methods.  If the […]
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Cell Biology

Crystal Mysticism Invades Astrobiology
March 20, 2009
Mystical ideas about the life-giving power of crystals usually go with New Age movies and storefronts.  Science is above all that, right?  Then what is a reader supposed to think of this opening line by Leslie Mullen on Space.com? One of the greatest mysteries about the origin of life is how the necessary ingredients consistently […]
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Cell Biology

Shedding Light on the Protein Big Bang Theory
March 13, 2009
The precise three-dimensional structure of a typical protein molecule is so complex, its origin would seem hopeless by chance.  What if evolutionary biologists were to discover a whole host of proteins literally exploded into existence at the beginning of complex life?  We can find out what they would think by looking at an article on […]
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Genetics

More Functional Non-Coding DNA Found
March 12, 2009
Another finding undermines the concept of “junk DNA.”  A team of scientists in Massachusetts found over a thousand functional RNA transcripts from intergenic sequences.  These RNA transcripts, coming not from genes but from regions earlier thought to be non-functional, take part in diverse functions from stem cell pluripotency to HOX gene developmental processes to cell […]
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