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Charles Darwin
Following my recent article about Darwin’s 150th Anniversary, the first draft of his book, “The Origin of Species” which changed the world’s attitude to evolution is available for the first time online. Papers which led to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution were previously only available to scholars at Cambridge University’s library.
This release makes his private papers, mountains […]
H3N2 flu virus (Courtesy www.primidi.com)
Each year, somewhere between five and 15 percent of the world’s population becomes infected during influenza A epidemics. These flu outbreaks are linked to as many as a half a million deaths annually, according to WHO. While vaccinations can be effective, influenza viruses often evolve so rapidly that creating effective vaccines […]
The Washington Post featured a series of thought-provoking articles in ‘The Science Century’ section of the newspaper.
Here are some of my favourites:
The Post’s Joel Achenbach writes about how “the most important things
happening in the world today…[will] be happening in laboratories — out
of sight, inscrutable and unhyped until the very moment when they change
life as we […]
Scientists from Helicos BioSciences, Ohio University, and Stanford University have published a paper in Science describing the first single-molecule sequencing of a whole genome.
The researchers used a single-molecule sequencing, sequencing-by-synthesis method, developed by Helicos, to sequence the roughly 7,000-nucleotide genome of the M13 virus. In the company’s version of single-molecule sequencing, an approach first proposed in the […]
Geneticist Craig Venter has announced that he is creating a life form that feeds on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel. He disclosed his potentially world-changing “fourth-generation fuel” project at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in California. Among the audience were Al Gore and Google co-founder Larry Page.
Biofuel alternatives to oil are third-generation. […]
(Photo credit: Flu viruses among cilia - National Geographic magazine http://www.nationalgeographic.com/)
US scientists have discovered a possible reason why the flu virus is seasonal and tends to infect people mostly in the winter. It has a jacket that melts in the summer causing the virus to die off, and stays hard in the winter, until it […]
Papers published in Nature and Science this week support the previously held theory that humans originated in East Africa, migrating outward until they reached all parts of the globe. But the genetic work from these studies brings a new level of precision to human migration studies, with each group finding subtle and intriguing details that shed light on different aspects of […]
‘Junk DNA’ could hold the key to the evolution of complex organisms . Vertebrates, animals that possess a backbone, are the most anatomically and genetically complex of all organisms, but explaining how they achieved this complexity has perplexed scientists since the conception of evolutionary theory.
A study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,USA, claims to […]
deCode has analysed its 200 year old Icelandic genealogical database and found that the closer the kinship of the couple the more children they are likely to have. This study provides the most comprehensive answer yet to the longstanding question of how kinship affects fertility in humans.
For example, for women born between 1800 and 1824, those […]
Researcher Ali S. Khashan of the University of Manchester, England and colleagues report that women who undergo an extremely stressful event during the first three months of pregnancy have an increased risk of having children who develop schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia is a disabling condition associated with abnormal brain structure and function, and it is believed to begin in […]
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