Category: Uncategorized
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This week, Biology in Science Fiction class goes to Pandora for Avatar. We’ll explore the phylogeny of Pandoran creatures, asking questions such as, when did the banshees diverge from the Na’vi? For warm-up, try the exercise above, to calculate the divergence tree of plant species on a different planet, Ralinius. The plant genomes were…
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Anthrax bacteria produce one of the most potent sets of toxins, a one-two-three punch that knocks out the immune system allowing the bacteria to grow unchecked in the blood. Anthrax bacteria were of course tamed by scientists in The Highest Frontier. Today, actual scientists are engineering the anthrax toxin to selectively knock out cancer cells.…
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Scientists still debate the truth about what lemmings actually do. Their periodic migrations can best be explained by dispersal in search of fresh resources. The strongest swimmers make it across the streams–and if the stream turns out to be an ocean, you’re just out of luck. Of course, genetic history is made by the winners–those…
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NASA’s Curiosity Rover found evidence that water rushed across a Martian stream bed. The pebbled ground bears remarkable resemblance to a dried stream bed on Earth. Can buried bacilli be far behind?
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1. According to a study published in the Weekly World News, 1/5 of Americans have been abducted by aliens. Suppose that the trait desired by aliens is genetic, with recessive inheritance; and that every person homozygous for this trait gets abducted. What is the allele frequency (p) of the alien abduction trait? What percentage of…
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I’m too busy grading Virology now to be posting, but some stories are too good to miss. Amid stem cell cures and global climate warnings, some scientists spend their come on matters of true importance: How the cheetah got its spots (or stripes, as may be). They’ve found two genes responsible: Taqpep and Edn3. How…
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Teaching full time again, I don’t get to update as often. I thought you might enjoy some of the questions my students are working on for Biology in Science Fiction. 1. Pandora isn’t the only place where people are blue. There is a real genetic condition of “blue people,” who lead normal lives. Here is…
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Here is how the Swedish physicians built a synthetic windpipe, out of plastic plus the patient’s own stem cells. No rejection drugs needed; the windpipe regenerates itself out of the body’s own cells, perhaps actually replacing the ones the doctor put in.This is science fiction coming home. Also BTW, those “socialist” physicians are doing their…
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Yesterday, our Moodle course management system unenrolled me from my own class. The class site disappeared into cloudspace, as as 50+ students were trying to submit their work. “No self enrol” it said. For those of you who live on another planet, or haven’t visited a high school or college classroom recently, Moodle is where growing…
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At Starship Reckless blog, Athena Andreadis has just released the TOC and first paragraph of each of the stories in her forthcoming anthology, The Other Half of the Sky. Already a promising start to what looks like a more interesting anthology than usual. My own contribution is the opening chapter of my Frontera sequel, story-titled “Landfall”:…
Joan Slonczewski 