Category: Uncategorized
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Looking forward to seeing you at the 50th Boskone! Here is my schedule: Friday Feb. 15 5:00pm Without Being a Token (QUILTBAG) The term QUILTBAG tries to point to many areas on the sexuality continuum — queer or questioning, unisex, intersex, lesbian, transgender or transexual, bisexual, asexual or ally, and gay. How do QUILTBAG characters…
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Oh my goodness! What could be so horrifying that our brave microbiologist can’t bear to look? The skeleton of a mouse–a wild mouse, one of many that get in from the woods and scamper throughout our building. This hapless rodent must have fallen into the tank of fiddler crabs. The crabs made short work of…
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Hard to believe our ancestor–and the ancestor of all mammals–looked like this, 66 million years ago. From rats to bats, anteaters to antelopes, whales to humans–all of us mammals emerged from this ancestral Lego kit of genes.
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This week my students will be trying out the “bacterial computer.” Originally constructed by biology students for the GCAT consortium, the bacterial computer has a plasmid of three flippable segments, two of which encode fluorescent proteins (red and green). The DNA segments get flipped by a protein called Hin Recombinase, originally invented by Salmonella enterica…
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Scientists report storing all of Shakespeare (and some MLK) in DNA. This is much like what the Sharers did in A Door into Ocean when they stored all their knowledge in the raft tree cells. DNA turns out to have excellent storage properties. When stored dry, it can be stable for hundreds of years. Multiple…
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Whatever happened to all those chimpanzees raised for medical experiments, to save our human lives? The lucky survivors, that is. Find out from this fascinating story on NPR. “Our job really is we’re housekeepers, we’re maids, we’re butlers, we’re servants.” That is how the directors of Save the Chimps describe their job. “Chimps live in…
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Click to see it move The first day of Microbiology class lab–and look at this Mystery Monster that appeared on a slide! It came from the slime on the floor of our greenhouse at Kenyon College. A student in the lab filmed it under the microscope. What do you think it is? Any ideas?
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Fecal transplants are in the news again. “The half-century old medical procedure has long been a measure of last resort, its mere mention enough to make a room full of doctors wrinkle their noses and laugh like schoolchildren: When a patient suffers from a gastrointestinal infection that keeps coming back, try transplanting someone else’s feces…
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At Taft Union high school, quoted from Salon: A student opened fire in a classroom of 28 students. According to reports, the male student — who at 16 is a juvenile and thus can’t be named by authorities — carried a 12-gauge shotgun and had pockets full of rounds. He injured one student with a…
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In nature, it seems, everything is good for something, no matter how disgusting. Mexican researchers have discovered that urban birds such as sparrows construct their nests our of cigarette butts in order to repel parasites such as mites. The researchers found that smoked cigarette “filter fluff” repelled nest parasites more than unsmoked cigarettes. I’m not…
Joan Slonczewski 