Four articles this month with three of them related to human biology. We’ll start with the biggest scientific news of the week however, which I suspect will also be the most important news of the year, about the creation of what is considered to be the first example of synthetic life.
This particular news has been reported in many outlets of course (though strangely I failed to notice it in any local publications) but the particular piece I’m linking to is from the BBC. The team responsible was led by Craig Venter who has already established his place in scientific history for being one of the winners of the race to sequence the complete human genome. This particular project involved creating a synthetic version of an existing bacterial genome and transplanting the result into a non-synthetic host cell. This new cell then replicated itself over a billion times, proving that the synthetic genome worked just as well as the natural one to regulate the bacterium over its life cycle.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (May ’10) →
A little late this month because I chose to write something about Ip Man 2 first this week. Four articles this time around with three of them on biology and the last one on astronomy. We’ll start with the more innocuous of the three biology articles first.
This is an article that appeared in Discover and concerns itself with gut bacteria, specifically those found inside of Japanese people. The Japanese as we all know, eat quite a lot of sushi and one of the main ingredients of sushi is seaweed. What most of us probably don’t know is that sea algae such as seaweed is a bit different from land-based plants and contain special sulphur-rich carbohydrates that are difficult for most of us to digest.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (April ’10) →
Three science articles for this month, one on how language shapes the way we think, the second one on Nokia’s plans to wirelessly recharge mobile phones and the last one, just for laughs, is a fictional piece on the neurobiology of zombies.
As the first article notes, whether and how much language affects how we think is a subject of much debate that even now is largely unsettled. This field is properly known as linguistic relativity. As someone who’s sympathetic to the views of the evolutionary psychologists, I found myself not quite agreeing with the full scope of this article’s implications, but nevertheless the results are intriguing. The most interesting part is easily the revelation of how language has affected a small Aboriginal community in Pormpuraaw, in northern Australia.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (June ’09) →
The unexamined life is a life not worth living