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 [...]

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 [...]

I’ve recently been reading “The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a nineteenth-century Russian novelist, and I came across the following quote:
“Remember always, young man… that science which has become a great power in the last century, has analyzed everything divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of [...]