Categories
Archives
Author Archives: jyaron
Forget World of Warcraft… CellCraft: a Fantastic and Informational Cell Biology Flash Game
I was pleasantly surprised to discover a new flash game that was released today at Kongregate Games. CellCraft is a truly great flash game about building, controlling, and surviving as a human cell, viewed at the microscopic scale. I was even more surprised to find how accurate the game was, depicting organelles correctly and even [...]
Early Study Linking Vaccines to Autism Officially Retracted
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 [...]
Inbreeding in Panda Population?: Extremely Rare Brown and White Panda Spotted
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, [...]
Surprise! Jenny McCarthy Completely Ignores Scientific Research
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 [...]
Nature’s Exciting Expectations for the New Year
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 [...]
Posted in Biology, Cell Biology, Ecology and Environmental Biology, Genetics, Genomics, Lists Tagged Climate, Craig Venter, HIV, Nature, Stem cells 5242 Comments
Evidence for Environmental and Epigenetic Cause of Autism
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 Autism, Epigenetics, Genetics, Vaccinations 4498 Comments
Transgenic, Green Monkeys Provide Possibility of Primate Model Organisms
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 [...]
Posted in Biology, Genetics, Health & Medicine, Zoology Tagged Genetics, Marmosets, Nature, Primates, Transgenics 7597 Comments
Back to the future: bone proteins discovered in 100 million year old fossil