Tag Archive | biology
Neil Shubin’s New Book Connects the Human Community to its Cosmic Roots
University of Chicago evolutionary biologist, Neil Shubin, PhD, just published his new book, “The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People,” a follow up to his 2008 best-seller, “Your Inner Fish.” Where “Your Inner Fish” goes back millions of years to look at the evolutionary links between human anatomy and other […]
Alan Turing’s Underrated Biology
By Rob Mitchum Alan Turing is best known as the father of the modern computer, a skillful World War II codebreaker, and a pioneer in the study of artificial intelligence. But in the last years before Turing’s death at age 41, he aimed his genius at a different target: the then-stalled field of developmental biology. […]
Doubling the Dictionary of Protein Modification
A cell is full of language. There’s the four-letter code of DNA, the slightly different four-letter dialect of RNA, and the three-letter words that direct the construction of proteins, which are built out of an alphabet of 20 amino acids. In recent years, scientists have slowly revealed another vocabulary superimposed on top of this language, […]
Breast Cancer in Isolation
Loneliness can be deadly. In humans, there is a statistical relationship between social interaction and mortality – the more isolated you are, the lower your chances of living a long life. Rats kept in social isolation their entire life die at a younger age than littermates who lived in groups closer to their natural social […]
Linkage 9/2: Counting Species, Ancient Drug Resistance, Sleep & Hypertension
Writing about science means looking up a lot of numbers. Trying to find a figure for the number of cells in the body or the protein-encoding genes in human DNA or patients diagnosed with ovarian cancer from 1980 through 1995 can eat up a lot of time and internet bandwidth. For some of these oft-cited […]
A Face Only a Biologist Could Love
In evolutionary biology today, it’s the ugly guys who get famous. But that hasn’t always been the case. When paleontologists were assembling a library of prehistoric life in the 19th century, they wanted to find the fossils they could easily categorize. The freaks, the weirdos, and the oddities were less well received, square pegs that […]
A Time Machine for Limb Evolution
It’s one of the most significant events in Earth’s history: the moment when a sea creature first stepped – or more likely wriggled – onto land. The momentous occasion 400 million years ago opened up a whole new habitat where life on Earth could evolve and spread out, and made that first bold pioneer and […]
What Happens to Gorillas on the Pill
In zoos, keepers strive to preserve as much of the natural experience as possible for their animals. But not everything can be left up to nature behind zoo walls. While encouraging reproduction can be a zoo mission for captive endangered species, other species can’t be allowed to procreate without limits, lest the zoo run out […]
The Leaky Pipeline of Women in Science
By Meghan Sullivan That there even was a luncheon at Crerar library last week to welcome Nancy Hopkins was a sign of progress. Speaking of a committee formed at MIT in 1995 to explore gender discrimination among tenured faculty, she commented that their meetings were generally held off campus since “having that many women in […]
Linkage 6/3: Quantrell Award and Gloopy Transplants
Teaching with Treadmills Inside the Biological Sciences Learning Center on the Medical Center campus is a laboratory that looks more like a gymnasium. Six state-of-the-art treadmills and six futuristic exercise bikes sit around the room, each connected to a computer alongside modified oxygen masks and suction cup sensors. Instead of dissecting frogs or mixing chemicals, […]
