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 [...]

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 [...]

UPDATE* if you do not see your post mentioned, see note at the bottom of the post.
IT…HAS…ARRIVED!
The long awaited, much delayed eighth edition of the Carnival of Evolution is here.
I won’t go into the excuses, other than to say that one of them was the death of my grandfather - a man whose love of [...]

In a cool new study in PLoS Genetics, through artificial selection researchers have allowed fruit flies (Drosophila) to evolve tolerance to normally lethal low levels of Oxygen.
To many scientists, this type of research will not be seen as that impressive, as a general finding. Artificial selection has been occurring for millennia, and it is the [...]

This has probably been around a while. I’ve had this sitting on my hard drive for ages.  But given my earlier post on Sarah Palin’s utter ignorance of Science and this quote about Sarah Palin from Philip Munger on Salon.com…
“I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old [...]

Transhumanism, to quote Wikipedia is
“a term often used as a synonym for “human enhancement“, is an international, intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of science and technology to enhance human mental and physical abilities and aptitudes, and overcome what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, [...]

In a previous post I highlighted one of the great questions facing science today: how did we evolve and what specific genes make us different from our cousins in the animal kingdom?
In a new study reported in this month’s issue of PLoS Genetics, Carolin Kosiol and colleagues have demonstrated the most complete analysis of the [...]

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 [...]

It now appears that the lowly worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, has evolved a new sensory perception heretofore unknown to science. In the current issue of PLoS Biology, Stacey L. Edwards, Kenneth G. Miller, and others have shown that these nematodes can detect ultraviolet light using receptors completely unlike any other light receptive molecule in visual systems. [...]

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).

I occasionally hear people talk about what humans will look and be like in the future. They hypothesize about what the next steps in human evolution will be. Will we continue to become more intelligent, taller, or more able to manipulate things with our hands etc., according to the previous trends in our evolution. However, [...]

I hope every single one of you realizes that “the perfect human” is a phrase completely devoid of meaning in a constantly changing world and universe.
I read an article yesterday in TIME magazine that made some good points about genetic engineering, and as I often do, I started thinking about this subject: scientists genetically engineering [...]