Author Archives: jyaron

Early Study Linking Vaccines to Autism Officially Retracted

By jyaron | Published: February 4, 2010
The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals, retracted a study on February 2nd that linked autism to vaccinations. The study by Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues, originally published in 1998, is titled “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children.” The study was one of the first scientific publications that spurned [...]
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Inbreeding in Panda Population?: Extremely Rare Brown and White Panda Spotted

By jyaron | Published: January 20, 2010
An extremely rare brown and white panda was recently spotted in the Qinling region of China. Only 7 such examples of this pigmentation have been seen in the past 25 years, suggesting that the low numbers of giant pandas have lead to inbreeding. This suggestion stems from the nature of this particular sort of pigmentation, [...]
Posted in Genetics, Genomics, Zoology | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Surprise! Jenny McCarthy Completely Ignores Scientific Research

By jyaron | Published: January 8, 2010
I’m sure by now that we’re all aware of the actress and “activist” Jenny McCarthy and her crusade against the medical and biomedical research community. Her unfounded and dangerous belief that vaccines increase the frequency of autism has been making a splash in the easily convinced minds of many parents who are desperate to help [...]
Posted in AntiScience, Health & Medicine | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Nature’s Exciting Expectations for the New Year

By jyaron | Published: January 8, 2010
It seems that Nature magazine has high hopes (and don’t we all) for research progress in 2010. Among goals such as glimpsing the origins of the universe and other Earth-like planets, the biological topics expected to make big impacts are: Stopping/preventing species loss globally Synthetic genome from pioneers such as Craig Venter A surge in the number of [...]
Posted in Biology, Cell Biology, Ecology and Environmental Biology, Genetics, Genomics, Lists | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Most Cited Articles Roundup 2009: H1N1 Flu Virus

By jyaron | Published: January 5, 2010
Similar to the previous post about the Most Cited Articles of 2009, I thought it might be interesting to look at some of the other big topics of this past year and what research done this past year was considered most impacting by the research community. For the next few weeks I will be posting [...]
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Evidence for Environmental and Epigenetic Cause of Autism

By jyaron | Published: January 2, 2010
A study published a few months ago in the journal NeuroToxicology investigates the non-random variation in prevalence of autism. The study has shown that the highest frequency of autism occurs in areas of the study location (Minnesota) with increased amounts of pollution in the environment, such as mercury and pesticides. The study concludes there is [...]
Posted in AntiScience, Biology, Genetics | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Top 10 Most Cited Biology Articles of 2009

By jyaron | Published: January 2, 2010
With a new year ahead of us and tons of exciting research to be done it’s time to be a little retrospective about all that the scientific community has accomplished this last year. The following are the top 10 most cited biology articles published in 2009 as recorded in the ISI Web of Knowledge: Human Induced [...]
Posted in Biology, Lists | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Transgenic, Green Monkeys Provide Possibility of Primate Model Organisms

By jyaron | Published: January 2, 2010
This story is a few months old, but I was reading through the Nature homepage and came across their selected Images of the Year slideshow. Many of these images have to do with various space-related or physics themes, but of particular interest to me when browsing through the images was a gorgeous image of fluorescent [...]
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Discovery Institute’s Embarrassing Diatribe About Darwinism

By jyaron | Published: December 28, 2009
The Discovery Institute is a dangerous organization to be associated with; not necessarily physically dangerous, but academic careers can spiral to oblivion when members of this Seattle-based Intelligent Design (read: “science needs religion!”) group make statements like the one they did today. This article is title “PBS: Publishing Bad Science” and discusses (with evidence that [...]
Posted in AntiScience, Evolutionary Biology, Genetics, Genomics | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Colo, Oldest Captive Gorilla, Celebrates 53rd Birthday

By jyaron | Published: December 24, 2009
The oldest living gorilla in captivity, Colo (from Columbus, Ohio), celebrated her 53rd birthday with what looks like a giant, great ape-size cake (see video, click image or here). Interestingly, Colo is also the first gorilla every born in captivity. A Western Gorilla, her species is Critically Endangered. Colo is quite the matriarch, with one [...]
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