Tag: biology
-
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…
-
Reverse evolution. Strange as Evolution…
The saga of the Osedax “bone-eating” worms began 12 years ago, with the first discovery of these deep-sea creatures that feast on the bones of dead animals. The Osedax story grew even stranger when researchers found that the large female worms contained harems of tiny dwarf males. Examining bone worms collected at 700 meters (2,296…
-
Melatonin. Sleep. An ancient secret long forgotten…
As much as we may try to deny it, Earth’s cycle of day and night rules our lives. When the sun sets, the encroaching darkness sets off a chain of molecular events spreading from our eyes to our pineal gland, which oozes a hormone called melatonin into the brain. When the melatonin latches onto neurons,…
-
Organs from “scratch”! NOT!
In what’s being hailed as a scientific first, researchers in Scotland have created a fully functional organ from scratch inside the body of a living animal. (1) Well, because scientists keep making the same claims over and over again, I am oblidged to make the same clarifications over and over again… It is in the…
-
Samalanders, limb regeneration, “programming” life…
The secret of how salamanders successfully regrow body parts is being unravelled by researchers in a bid to apply it to humans. For the first time, researchers have found that the ‘ERK pathway’ must be constantly active for salamander cells to be reprogrammed, and hence able to contribute to the regeneration of different body parts.…
You must be logged in to post a comment.