Tag: biology
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A new tree of life… No branches or roots required…
The tree of life might seem like a stable design, appropriate for indelible ink. Plenty of people think so. An Internet search for “phylogenetic tattoos” turns up some showy skin art. But the branches are shifting. Since a radial diagram based on 1990s genetics inspired a rush for tree-of-life tattoos, technical diagrams of life’s ancestral…
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Let the chicken be. Live. [An argument against analysis of anything]
Birds evolved from dinosaurs 150 million years ago, a slow but thorough transformation. Their bodies gained aerodynamic feathers, their digits fused into wings, and they acquired a beak used to gather food. We can see some details of this evolutionary marvel in the fossil record. Yet even the most exquisitely preserved fossil can’t tell us…
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Mind over Body. Life over Death.
"I think, therefore I am" is perhaps the most familiar one-liner in western philosophy. Even if the stoners, philosophers and quantum mechanically-inclined skeptics who believe we’re living an illusion are right, few existential quips hit with such profound, approachable simplicity. The only catch is that in Descartes’ opinion, "we" – our thoughts, our personalities, our…
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DNA. On the edge… Breath in.... Breath out!
For a skin cell to do its job, it must turn on a completely different set of genes than a liver cell -- and keep genes it doesn't need switched off. One way of turning off large groups of genes at once is to send them to "time-out" at the edge of the nucleus, where…
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Cancer. Bad luck. Evolution. Luck. Lack of luck...
Some tissue types give rise to human cancers millions of times more often than other tissue types. Although this has been recognized for more than a century, it has never been explained. Here, we show that the lifetime risk of cancers of many different types is strongly correlated (0.81) with the total number of divisions…
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