Coelacanth genome sequenced

by Greg Mayer Coelacanths are one of the three surviving groups of sarcopterygian (lobe-finned) fishes, and along with lungfish, one of the two groups that have remained fish in the vernacular sense (we tetrapods, the third surviving group, have of course become legged). The coelacanths also have a tremendous back story: known in the fossil […]

Genes should not be patented

Did you know that the U.S. Supreme Court is currently considering a case with wide ramifications, a case involving whether genes—human genes in this case—can be patented? (For longer analyses, see the NPR story here and the New York Times story here). At issue is the patenting by a Utah Company, Myriad Genetics, of two […]

Richard III in a Leicester car park

by Greg Mayer No, it’s not an avant-garde staging of Shakespeare, but the actual skeletal remains of the last Plantagenet king of England. Archeologists recovered the remains last summer based on historical accounts of where he was interred following his death at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. The church of Greyfriars in which he […]

“MOOC”s on critical thinking at Michigan State and on genetics and evolution at Duke

I hate the acronym “MOOC” almost as much as I do the word “blog.” But what it stands for—”massive open online courses”—are innovations that promise to make education widely available to those who aren’t near universities or lack the time or exorbitant tuition that modern universities demand. My ex-student, Mohamed Noor, is again running a […]

BBC’s Science Club with Dara O Briain

I’ve always been a fan of Dara O Briain—well, at least since I’ve known of this “strident” atheistic comedian and science love, which has been about a year.  Reader Tom told me that not only did O Briain have a new show, “Science Club” on the BBC, but that the first episode was on YouTube. […]

James Shapiro, in his attempts to forge a new evolutionary paradigm, is reduced to going after my commenters

My Chicago colleague James Shapiro appears to have been badly stung by my repeated criticisms of his attempts to forge a new evolutionary view based on the “self-engineering” of organisms and their DNA (see here,  here, here, and here, for instance). This will be the last time I comment on Shapiro’s PuffHo pieces, as I […]

Popular press wildly overblows “gene for humanity”

I’m about to describe one of the worst examples of science journalism I’ve seen in ages. It is a lesson on how the popular press overblows interesting scientific findings into world-shaking discoveries. miRNAs, or “microRNAs”, are small molecules of RNA, produced by the DNA, that have recently been discovered to play an important role in […]

Free articles on the genomics of adaptation

The Proceedings of the Royal Society (B) has a special issue on the genomics of adaptation that it’s making available for free to everyone. You can see the contents here; they include these articles, which can be accessed directly from my links. Introduction: The genomics of adaptation by Jacek Radwan and Wieslaw Babik Research article: […]

Caturday felid: how the king cheetah got his stripes

by Greg Mayer and Jerry Coyne Our felid for today is actually five felids: a mackerel (striped) tabby, a blotched tabby, a spotted cheetah, a king cheetah and a black-footed cat. In a new paper in Science by Christopher Kaelin and colleagues, the physiological basis of these pattern variations in both domestic cats and cheetahs […]

Genetics lesson?

This is one of the funnier animal posters I’ve seen recently: it’s a science-themed LOLGoat! And very clever it is, too. Three points: 1. No, this is not Photoshopped. 2. Yes, they are goats, not sheep 3.  They aren’t heterozygoats at a “color” locus (though they’re undoubtedly heterozygoats at many DNA positions in their genomes). […]