Humans are hard-wired not to be hard-wired. That phrase, drawn from Ken Weiss, is perhaps the simplest of the many ways that Patrick Clarkin tries to convey, in his wonderful post “Developmental Plasticity and the ‘Hard-Wired’ Problem,” how thoroughly entwined are genetics and experience in shaping and constantly reshaping any organism. It’s silly, in a way, to […]
Continue reading →Turns out one of the world’s ugliest creatures, the naked mole rat, does not get cancer, even if you really hard to make it happen. The coverage is fabulous: Ed Yong, at National Geographic’s Phenomena: Put aside their inability to feel pain in their skin, their tolerance for chokingly low oxygen levels, their bizarrely rubbish […]
Continue reading →How is a box score like a genome sequence? This starts a wee slow, but go with it: Noted computational biologists James Fraser (UCSF) and Michael Eisen (Berkeley) explain how obsessions with baseball stats led them — and can lead others — to be data-heavy biologists. First lesson, for example: Predictions are stronger based on (open) […]
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