I’m back!!!
Oh…you never realized I was gone?
Ah well, that’s ok, because I AM back – back from a stressful few months of wondering where I would end up, how I would feed my babies (i.e. cats) and their baby-momma (my wife – yeah that does sound rather gross), and several dozen unknowns also thrown into [...]

Just a couple of quick notes to my fellow developmental biologists out there:
First, due to my recent post, Science Blogging: The Future of Science Communication & Why You Should be a Part of it, I was reminded through my comments at Larry Moran’s reaction post at Sandwalk that I haven’t met very many developmental biologist [...]

If you haven’t read my piece on Flatfish Eyes & Recapitulation Theory, you should check it out. For those of you who have read it, I updated it with the following AMAZING morph animations of flatfish development that I somehow missed before (much thanks to Adrian Thysse, FCD of Evolving Complexity for pointing these out [...]

Most biologists at one time or another in their training have learned of the 19th century theory expounded upon by Ernst Haeckel called “Recapitulation Theory“.
The theory’s thesis: “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Don’t worry – it’s not as complicated as the biological jargon might imply.
The idea boils down to a simple one – one that seemed to [...]

Happy 200th birthday, Charles Darwin!
Happy 200th birthday, Abraham Lincoln!
Happy 150th anniversary, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life!
And here’s to a happy Darwin Day and upcoming Valentine’s Day to everyone else.
As a part of my own contribution to the Blog for [...]

Once, again the past decades of developmental biology research has been forgotten amidst the layman’s limited understanding of the potential wonders of genetic technology.
It started off innocently enough: Time.com began a series of articles on “Visions of the 21st Century.”
With daily headlines on the rampant success of molecular, genetic, organismal, and evolutionary biology, it seems [...]

I grew these mouse embryonic stem cells on a plate, and through various molecular trickery, I made them turn in to the crazy cell types you see here. (Click for larger images)

Check out the next two images. They are the same cells viewed in two different ways (normal light, and epifluorescence).

Long neuronal axons stretch [...]

Ever since the evolution of the sensory neuron, organisms have been using the these amazing peepholes into existence to direct the course of their lives. Now, humankind has elevated the role of these senses, and even created technological extensions of them, in order to find order and true knowledge of this Universe in which we [...]

These are mouse embryonic stem cells that I coerced to differentiate into brain cells. The neurons are green, red represents the radial glia (they proved a scaffold for the neurons), and the blue are the nuclei of the cells (that houses the DNA).