This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Down, with turtles and elephants — The fabled dominance of the hare by the tortoise has an underground counterpart of sorts in a look at turtles and elephants in times gone by. The elephants came out […]
What makes most scientists most excited is the same thing that—if they’ve heard about it—makes many non-scientists wonder if scientists are nuts: Way more than half of “the stuff the universe is made of” is still a mystery to scientists. Which may strike you as a crazy thing to realize, and a crazy thing to say. […]
Karen A. Fox and friends developed a new way to test whether—or not—a bobcat has a goodly amount of domestic cat inside it. They (Fox and friends) tell the story in a newly published study: “A Novel Test for Determination of Wild Felid-Domestic Cat Hybridization,” E.S. Chiu, K. Fox, L. Wolfe, and S. Vandewoude, Forensic […]
Medical Energetics Ltd. of Galway, Ireland, has just been granted (Nov. 2018) a US patent for the invention of ‘Agricultural applications of a double helix conductor’ (DHC) The extraordinariness of which can probably only be appreciated by reading the patent document [click link or image above]. The company has also applied for another patent (March […]
Molecular biology research, once seen as exotic, now showers benefits on the population at large. The May 29, 2018 issue of The Irish Sun brings news of the newest benefit: HERE COMES THE SON Dentist who owns John Lennon’s tooth will use DNA test to find Beatle’s potential love children in bid to claim slice of […]
Three days after James Watson (of eventual molecular-structure-of-DNA fame) was born, Tom Lehrer (eventual author and singer of “The Elements” and much more) was born. Make of that what you will. This month, each of them becomes 90 years old. Andrew Robinson wrote an appreciation of Tom Lehrer, in Nature magazine.
Craig Roberts, at the University of Stirling, warns you, based on his research, that there are “more reason to choose fragrances carefully“: there is no one-scent-fits-all effect here. Different fragrances suit different people. In a study with my Czech colleague [Ig Nobel Prize winner] Jan Havlíček, we found that some people get this spectacularly wrong. While […]
Dan Gaur, a member of the Luxuriant Former Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS), and a colleague published a paper on the (little-known) Watson-Crick controversy: “The Multiple Personalities of Watson and Crick Strands,” Reed A. Cartwright and Dan Graur, Biology Direct, vol. 6, no. 7, 2011. The authors, at the University of Houston, explain: “Background: In genetics it is […]
Travellers on the New York and Boston subway systems might allow themselves a sigh of relief – Yersinia pestis (the causative agent of plague) and Bacillus anthracis (the causative agent of anthrax) might not be living in the subway systems after all. This is the finding of a new investigation published in the journal mSystems™, […]
Mark A Jobling [pictured here] of the University of Leicester writes about the genetic underpinnings of exotic meats. His essay, called “Flogging a dead horse“, appears in the journal Investigative Genetics [2013, 4:5]: People eat mules, as well as donkeys and horses, and in meat contamination testing, mule meat would appear to be horsemeat, because of the […]