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“Thought of you as my mountain top,
Thought of you as my peak.
Thought of you as everything,
I’ve had but couldn’t keep.
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.”
-The Velvet Underground – “Pale Blue Eyes”
The instant that my blue-eyed son Zach was born – to a green-eyed mother and brown-eyed father – I became interested in the genetics of [...]

The human genome, and most others for that matter, is a massive and complex template containing the written instructions for life. Those instructions, our complement of protein coding genes, make up only about 1.5 percent of the genome and are nestled among billions of base pairs of so-called junk DNA. This is a misnomer, however, [...]

The discovery of the New World in the 15th century presented a novel opportunity for exchange of culture, society and biology between two geographically isolated worlds. It did not go particularly well. At the human level, it has been generally accepted that the New Worlders got the short end of the stick as Europeans rained [...]

One of my favorite parts of my job is the teaching that I get to do every year around this time. One of Oxford’s many charming idiosyncracies is the tutorial system they use for undergraduate teaching. In addition to lectures and labs, each student gets one-on-one or small group tutorials in their fields of study. [...]

“The tears on my shoulder
Freeze then boil
I wouldn’t be here
If not for your snake oil…”
-Kristin Hersh – “Snake Oil”
One side-effect of the global warming era is that if you can sell a concept or products as “green” it can go a long way. There is a green alternative for nearly every product that you use [...]

A group of German scientists published in this week’s Science their discovery of fungus preserved in Cretaceous Period amber that used a unique means of trapping its prey. This fungus used what essentially looks like a hyphal lasso to rope in its prey of choice, a species of roundworm (see the image to the right). [...]

“You didn’t know how rock-n-roll looked
Until you caught your sister with the guys from the group
Halfway home in the parking lot
By the look in her eye she was giving what she got
My my my, once bitten, twice shy babe…”
Great White – “Once Bitten, Twice Shy”
Somewhere, a science reporter is missing a lead: “Scientists discover the [...]

“All I ask for when I pray,
Steady rollin woman gonna come my way.
Need a woman gonna hold my hand
And tell me no lies, make me a happy man.”
- Led Zeppelin – “Black Dog”
I knew as soon as I saw this paper in Science this week that I wouldn’t be able to resist.

My friend and fellow scientist Jason has been hassling me to write a post about the recent stem cell breakthroughs that have been all over the news for the last week. Two research groups, one led by Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University and the other by James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin, have published [...]

This week in Science Tuesday we’ll focus on research with implications on the beginnings and the ends of human life. First, a study from Yale looking at the morality of infants and second, a paper from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Seattle suggesting that a certain class of anti-depressant can increase the lifespan of [...]