Among the hidden stars of the gulf cleanup is an oil-hungry bacterium that Dr. Seuss could have named — Alcanivorax. It and fellow microbes are breaking down a significant amount of the oil that gushed into the environment from BP’s runaway well, scientists say. The microbial feasting is known as biodegradation.

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"This is the first clear evidence that suggests our ability to produce sperm is very ancient, probably originating at the dawn of animal evolution 600 million years ago," said Eugene Xu, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Feinberg. "This finding suggests that all animal sperm production likely comes from a common prototype."

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Vicky Peláez was a prolific writer, to say she leaned towards the left is an understatement. At least half of those of us who followed her columns always suspected her of being a rabid communist. Not surprising given that many living in South America tend to get taken in by communist ideas. However, these recent events were way beyond even my imagination. You really can't make this stuff up. What do you get when you combine a rabid socialist from South America with a Russian spy? Nothing, apparently.

There are reports that the Russians were becoming increasingly frustrated with the couple because they kept feeding them stuff they already knew, or information from dubious sources. One wonders why they didn't pull the plug a long time ago. You might speculate that the true intention was culture warring. Like I said, she was a prolific writer. Over half of a recent article of her's was quoted by Castro . Never underestimate the potential, or at least the belief in the potential, of a culture warrior.

The more people are drawn into the global division of labour, the more people can specialise and exchange, the wealthier we will all be. Moreover, along the way there is no reason we cannot solve the problems that beset us, of economic crashes, population explosions, climate change and terrorism, of poverty, AIDS, depression and obesity. It will not be easy, but it is perfectly possible, indeed probable, that in the year 2110, a century after this book is published, humanity will be much, much better off than it is today, and so will the ecology of the planet it inhabits. This book dares the human race to embrace change, to be rationally optimistic and thereby to strive for the betterment of humankind and the world it inhabits.

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Modularity is often referred to as the clustering coefficient of a network. It is defined as the average fraction of the neighbors of a node that are also neighbors of each other. I will refer to this as CC (clustering coefficient) below.

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Of fractal patterns and biblical data

Phylogenetically, it looks like the ancestral proteasome subunit diverged into alpha- and beta-subunits, whereas E. coli contains only one beta-type subunit, termed HslV, which each harbors a proteolytically active site. HslV is a homomer composed of 12 identical subunits made by one gene. The 20s proteasome is a heteromer composed of 28 non-identical subunits. Those 28 proteins can be made from anywhere from 2 to 14 different genes, but they will all have the same fold. The 20s proteasome is the result of a duplication of a homomer. When the 28mer came up, a new intermolecular interface had to be formed to attach the alpha to the beta ring. If alpha and beta would be identical, then there would have been the possibility to make a long fiber like an actin or myosin fiber. Therefore alpha and beta need to be different. Thus, the gene duplication that lead to alpha, beta was necessary to allow for the 28 mer. A neat animation below the fold

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I'm about to make some very substantial changes to this site. I've turned off several plugins that were causing problems. The edit/preview functionality willl return soonish.

Cancer is usually the result of an accumulation of mutations over a long period of time but researchers were not ready for what they found in this patient’s tumor tissue. The tumor tissue contained 50,000 genetic mutations in the man’s genomic DNA. Researcher Zemin Zhang said his team was so shocked that they rechecked their work to make sure their results were correct.

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The blogosphere last week was buzzing over a study that shows that most of the human genome may not be transcribed. Many have said that the rest of the genome is therefore "junk" or "wasteful garbage". I think this is only one explanation among many.

All that "junk" DNA may actually be a sea of potentiality when it comes to function. It appears to be very difficult to make proteins out of the blue from an evolutionary perspective. One recent study has shown that proteins diverge very slowly. On the other hand, it is probably a lot easier to make regulatory elements.

Although some parts of noncoding regions within our genome will eventually reveal no detectable biological function, a growing hypothesis speculates that much of an organism’s genetic complexity is due to elaborate transcriptional regulatory signals embedded in our noncoding DNA that determine when, where, and what amount of a gene transcript is expressed.

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In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why.
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