2,429 results
2,429 results for: mutations
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Science for science writers
Science News blogs from Austin, Texas, where the 47th annual New Horizons in Science meeting is taking place. Freelance Laura Beil describes how Skip Garner began his accidental journey into scientific misconduct investigation after he developed a computer program that could, as he put it, “help a physicist understand medicine,” he told writers in the audience at the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing symposium. Got milk tolerance? Your ability to digest lactose as an adult is relatively new in the human species. And, said John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, provides evidence of rapid evolution over the past 10,000 years, Elizabeth Quill reports in this blog from the meeting. Virgil Griffith’s life goal is “to create a machine who feels.” Griffith, a doctoral student at Caltech, isn’t the only one. During his talk, he revealed that turning people into cyborgs is the secret passion of many of his Caltech peers, Rachel Ehrenberg reports. (They contend that they are working on implant devices for the injured bodies of people like Vietnam vets, says Griffith, but if you get them drunk they’ll confess that the real aim is to make cyborgs of us all.) Also, blogging from: Eva Emerson on some new results on longevity without caloric restriction in yeast; freelance Susan Gaidos on a Boston University medical statistician who has devoted lots of time to studying errors in the voting process, and says things can, and do, routinely go wrong; and Lisa Grossman on how mapping fossil fuel emissions may help scientists find where carbon is hiding in the biosphere.
- Life
Genetic analysis of swine flu virus reveals diverse parts
Detailed genetic analysis of the H1N1 swine flu virus indicates that its components have been present for years. The virus is still susceptible to drugs and vaccine development.
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Venom hunters
Scientists probe toxins, revealing the healing powers of biochemical weapons.
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Enzymes Exposed
Clearer views of the cell’s movers and shakers threaten a century-old mainstay of biology.
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Letters
Don’t dismiss Lamarck Your January 31 special birthday edition on Darwin (SN: 1/31/09, p. 17) was excellent, but I believe that science has allowed Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s contributions to be overshadowed by Darwin’s. The change that can occur to an organism’s genetic makeup during its own lifetime harks away from Darwin’s slow evolutionary process by chance […]
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Rare mutations tied to schizophrenia
Individual-specific DNA deletions and duplications, many located in genes involved in brain development, occur in an unusually large percentage of people with schizophrenia.
- Health & Medicine
Sequencing virus genome to cure the common cold
The genomes of all known common cold viruses have been sequenced, providing new information on how the different strains are related, how they replicate and how to predict their virulence.
- Life
Duplication in genomes may separate humans from apes
A sudden peak in duplication of chunks of DNA in the common ancestor of humans, chimps and gorillas led to genetic flexibility, which created differences among the species.
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- Health & Medicine
Early intellectual gap found for kids of older fathers
A reanalysis of data from more than 33,000 U.S. children finds that those with older fathers fared somewhat poorer on intelligence tests than those with younger fathers, regardless of mothers’ ages.
- Life
A better understanding of inherited breast cancer
New studies on a type of inherited breast cancer identify a key factor with different roles in different cancers.
