Towards a web of life- Ferris Jabr at Aeon Magazine on jumping genes and evolution. “As far as anyone knew, the gene (…) existed in only two types of plants separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution: ferns and algae. It was extremely unlikely that the gene had been passed down from a […]
Ernst Haeckel’s 19th century tree of human evolution. Cambridge University epidemiologist Simon Frost spoke at the IGC this Friday on ‘Integrating pathogen evolution into epidemiological models of RNA viruses’. RNA viruses, or retroviruses, evolve at very fast due to high error rates when replicating their genome. Tracing this variation in time and space help us […]
“Yet I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it. One reason was that I feared that such a prize, as I believe is true of the activities of some of the great scientific foundations, would tend to accentuate the swings […]
Oddly compelling 1945 educational film.
A common drug prescribed for diabetes may have some very interesting effects on cancer. Alba Luengo and collaborators review the data on metformin versus tumors at BMC Biology (open access). Navdeep Chandel gives an interview to the same journal that lay readers may find more accessible. Sic transit gloria mundi. David Dobbs on his blog […]