Free Republic

Susan Lindquist has challenged conventional thinking on how misfolded proteins drive disease and may power evolution. But she still finds that criticism stings. On a frigid winter's morning in 1992, Susan Lindquist, then a biologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, trudged through the snow to the campus's intellectual-property office to share an unconventional idea for a cancer drug. A protein that she had been working on, Hsp90, guides misfolded proteins into their proper conformation. But it also applies its talents to misfolded mutant proteins in tumour cells, activating them and helping cancer to advance. Lindquist suspected that blocking...

New study brings to light physiological, cognitive differences of political left and right From cable TV news pundits to red-meat speeches in Iowa and New Hampshire, our nation's deep political stereotypes are on full display: Conservatives paint self-indulgent liberals as insufferably absent on urgent national issues, while liberals say fear-mongering conservatives are fixated on exaggerated dangers to the country. A new study from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln suggests there are biological truths to such broad brushstrokes. In a series of experiments, researchers closely monitored physiological reactions and eye movements of study participants when shown combinations of both pleasant and unpleasant...

PDF version Imagine a one-celled organism the size of a mango. It's not science fiction, but fact: scientists have cataloged dozens of giant one-celled creatures, around 4 inches (10 centimeters), in the deep abysses of the world's oceans. But recent exploration of the Mariana Trench has uncovered the deepest record yet of the one-celled behemoths, known as xenophyophores. Found at 6.6 miles beneath the ocean's surface, the xenophyophores beats the previous record by nearly two miles. The Mariana Trench xenophyophores were discovered by dropcams, developed by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and National Geographic, which are unmanned HD cameras 'dropped'...

Researchers say they have created the first ever animal with artificial information in its genetic code. The technique, they say, could give biologists "atom-by-atom control" over the molecules in living organisms. One expert the BBC spoke to agrees, saying the technique would be seized upon by "the entire biology community".The work by a Cambridge team, which used nematode worms, appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.The worms - from the species Caenorhabditis elegans - are 1mm long, with just a thousand cells in their transparent bodies.What makes the newly created animals different is that their genetic code has...

In 2007, a little known creature called a tardigrade became the first animal to survive exposure to space. It prevailed over sub-zero temperatures, unrelenting solar winds and an oxygen-deprived space vacuum. On Monday, this microscopic cosmonaut has once again hitched a ride into space on the Nasa shuttle Endeavour. Its mission: to help scientists understand more about how this so-called "hardiest animal on Earth" can survive for short periods off it. Tardigrades join other microscopic organisms selected to be part of a project into extreme survival. Shuttle Endeavour Endeavour climbs into the sky on Monday Project Biokis is sponsored by...

A genetics research group working in a lab in Kansas, has succeeded in creating a new species of lizard by mating two distinct species of North American Whiptails, both native to New Mexico. The offspring, all females are not only fertile, but can reproduce by laying eggs that don't need to be fertilized, which means, they actually clone themselves. Scientists have known for years that some species exist due to interspecies mating, the whiptail lizards have provided proof of that; they’ve been creating new species themselves for at least several hundred thousand years. What’s new is the process being manipulated...

Scientists are reporting discovery of an environmentally friendly way to make a key industrial material -- used in products ranging from paints to diapers -- from a renewable raw material without touching the traditional pricey and increasingly scarce petroleum-based starting material. Their report on a new catalyst for making acrylic acid appears in ACS Catalysis.Weijie Ji, Chak-Tong Au, and colleagues note that acrylic acid is essential for making paints, adhesives, textiles, leather treatments, and hundreds of other products. Global demand for the colorless liquid totals about 4 million tons annually. Acrylic acid is typically made from propylene obtained from petroleum....

When a happy young couple says “I do,” their marriage is contingent on their performing a specific sexual act. If they want to make their marriage real, they must consummate it. And that means that the meaning of marriage lies in the possibility of procreation. A marriage unconsummated is not a marriage. It is nullified, as though the ceremony had never happened. To become real, a marriage requires the possibility of conception. It does not require conception. Failure to conceive has never been grounds for nullification. Older, presumably infertile, couples are allowed to marry because if they had performed the...

Genetic researchers may have resolved a long-standing dispute by proving there are two species of African elephant.Savannah and forest elephants have been separated for at least three million years, they say, and are as distinct from each other as Asian elephants are from the extinct woolly mammoth. The researchers also made what they say are the first sequences of nuclear DNA from the extinct American mastodon. > "The divergence of the two species took place around the time of the divergence of the Asian elephant and woolly mammoths," said Michi Hofreiter, a specialist in ancient DNA at the UK's York...

The White House on Thursday said the controversial field of synthetic biology, or manipulating the DNA of organisms to forge new life forms, poses limited risks and should be allowed to proceed. An expert panel convened by President Barack Obama advised vigilance and self-regulation as scientists seeks ways to create new organisms that could spark useful innovations in clean energy, pollution control and medicine. The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues "concluded that synthetic biology is capable of significant but limited achievements posing limited risks," it said in its first report. "Future developments may raise further objections, but...

Snail shells can spiral to the left (sinistral) or to the right (dextral), as determined by a single gene, and a new study has found the advantage of being in the minority sinistral group: they survive predation by snakes much better than dextral snails. The effect of this advantage is so great they could separate into a distinct species. Mating between sinistral and dextral snails is almost impossible because their genitals are on opposite sides of their bodies. In the large Satsuma snails, for example, mating takes place face-to-face. All snails have both male and female reproductive organs, and when...

London: For the first time, scientists have discovered an "assassin" protein which attacks and kills rogue cells to protect the human immune system, a breakthrough that can lead to new treatments for a host of diseases, including cancer, malaria and diabetes. Using powerful electron microscopes, a team of Australian and British scientists found how the protein, called perforin, adopts a unique mechanism of punching holes in the cells that have become cancerous or infected by viruses. The the ten-year study, published in journal Nature, is the first to show how perforin plays an important role of cleaning wayward cells that...

A few scientists noticed in the late 1960s that the marine bacteria Vibrio fischeri appeared to coordinate among themselves the production of chemicals that produced bioluminescence, waiting until a certain number of them were in the neighborhood before firing up their light-making machinery. This behavior was eventually dubbed “quorum sensing.” It was one of the first in what has turned out to be a long list of ways in which bacteria talk to each other and to other organisms.

It may be a shot in the dark, but freezing sperm is one of the last chances to save the hellbender, North America's biggest salamander, conservationists say. Hellbenders—also known as snot otters and devil dogs—have dwindled throughout their range, which once encompassed streams from northeastern Arkansas to New York. The 2.5-foot-long (0.7-meter-long) amphibians have declined by 80 to 90 percent in most of their traditional watersheds in recent decades, and healthy populations now haunt only isolated pockets of southern Appalachia (see map) and Pennsylvania, said Dale McGinnity, curator of reptiles at Nashville Zoo. All of the states in the hellbender's...

Last week, a federal district court judge in northern California issued an injunction against planting biotech sugar beets next year. Why? He accepted the activist argument that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) must issue a full environmental impact statement (EIS) under the National Environmental Policy Act before permitting the improved sugar beets to be grown. An EIS is required when a federal government agency engages in actions that might be "significantly affecting the quality of the human environment." So how are biotech sugar beets (already approved by the USDA, mind you) significantly affecting the human environment? Activists at the...

Scientists have stumbled across the first example of a photosynthetic organism living inside a vertebrate's cells. The discovery is a surprise because the adaptive immune systems of vertebrates generally destroy foreign biological material. In this case, however, a symbiotic alga seems to be surviving unchallenged — and might be giving its host a solar-powered metabolic boost. Algae cohabit with salamander embryos in their eggs — and inside their cells.T. LEVIN/PHOTOLIBRARY.COM The embryos of the spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum) have long been known to enjoy a mutualistic relationship with the single-celled alga Oophila amblystomatis. The salamanders' viridescent eggs are coloured by...

Santa Cruz police are working with the FBI to investigate the vandalism of a car belonging to a University of California at Santa Cruz researcher on Sunday morning. The spouse of the researcher, whose name is being withheld, found the car at about 11 a.m. Sunday with its brake lines and cables to the emergency braking system cut, police said. The damage had left the braking system inoperable. Officers responded to the victim's home in the 1200 block of Laurent Street and after speaking with the 55-year-old researcher, determined the motive behind the vandalism may be related to the victim's...

Fired Calif. professor exonerated in settlement of lawsuit against San Jose college district Case settles after court affirms teachers’ First Amendment rights in the classroom Thursday, July 22, 2010, 12:00 AM (MST) | ADF Media Relations | 480-444-0020 SAN JOSE, Calif. — Alliance Defense Fund attorneys have reached a settlement with the San Jose/Evergreen Community College District in a lawsuit filed on behalf of a biology professor. Professor June Sheldon was fired after objectively answering a student’s in-class question simply because a different student claimed to be “offended” by her answer, even though it comported with the official class curriculum...

Long before TV's campy Fantasy Island, the isolation of island communities has touched an exotic and magical core in us. Darwin's fascination with the Galapagos island chain and the evolution of its plant and animal life is just one example. Think of the extensive lore surrounding island-bred creatures like Komodo dragons, dwarf elephants, and Hobbit-sized humans. Conventional wisdom has it that they -- and a horde of monster-sized insects -- are all products of island evolution. But are they? Dr. Shai Meiri of Tel Aviv University's Department of Zoology says "yes," they are a product of evolution, but nothing more...

07 June 2010 "AQ IN NORTHERN IRAQ: SEEKING A CHEMIST OR BIOLOGIST"

Heralding a potential new era in biology, scientists for the first time have created a synthetic cell, completely controlled by man-made genetic instructions, researchers at the private J. Craig Venter Institute announced Thursday. "We call it the first synthetic cell," said genomics pioneer Craig Venter, who oversaw the project. "These are very much real cells." Created at a cost of $40 million, this experimental one-cell organism, which can reproduce, opens the way to the manipulation of life on a previously unattainable scale, several researchers and ethics experts said. Scientists have been altering DNA piecemeal for a generation, producing a menagerie...

Don't let fears about frankenmicrobes halt promising research. Better medicines, carbon neutral fuels, cheaper food, and a cleaner environment—who could be against that? Well, quite a few people, as it turns out. Last week, a research team led by private human genome sequencer J. Craig Venter announced that they had created the world’s first synthetic self-replicating bacteria. Among other things, synthetic biologists are aiming to create a set of standardized biological parts that can be mixed and matched the way off-the-shelf microchips, hard drives, and screens can be combined to create a computer. The goal is to produce novel organisms...

"Some people think that my life began at birth, but my life's journey began long before I was born."

The principal of Oakwood Elementary School was put on administrative leave Friday as school officials continued their investigation of plastic human fetus dolls given to students by an employee. It was not known if Principal Sheila Tillett Holas knew about the dolls or approved the distribution, The Virginia-Pilot reports. The employee who gave the students the dolls was put on administrative leave Thursday. Elementary students given fetus dolls 12:25 p.m. A Virginia school employee was place on administrative leave Thursday after reports that the worker distributed plastic human fetus dolls to students at an elementary school. The Virginian-Pilot reports that...

Signature of Controversy is a new e-book that counter-argues to criticism of Stephen Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell. It consists of various essays by David Berlinski, David Klinghoffer, Casey Luskin, Paul Nelson, Jay Richards, Richard Sternberg and Stephen Meyer. Here is a paragraph from the intro: Published in 2009, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design is recognized as establishing one of the strongest pillars underlying the argument for intelligent design. To call the book fascinating and important is an understatement. No less interesting in its way, however, was the critical response and it is...

The Male Brain. By Louann Brizendine, M.D. New York: Broadway Books, 2010. www.crownpublishing.com. 271 pp. $24.99. Psychiatrist Louann Brizendine, currently of the University of California, San Francisco and formerly of Harvard Medical School, has published the predictable followup to her bestselling book The Female Brain. This may be the most accessible book I have ever read that has slightly more than half its length taken up with appendices, notes, references, and the index. In 135 easy-to-read pages, Brizendine lays out the basic functioning of the male brain. Despite the number of books addressing these general topics, the author stands...

US scientists have demonstrated the existence of undiscovered chemical pathways to an important class of bioactive lipids in the nervous system. Endocannabinoids are lipid messengers that play a key role in both central and peripheral tissues, where they participate in diverse physiological processes including appetite, pain-sensation, mood, and memory. Unlike other neurotransmitters such as amino acids and neuropeptides, they are not water soluble so cannot be stored in the body and are made on-demand from phospholipid precursors involving complex multiple pathways. A complete understanding of these mechanisms is crucial to understanding their effects in mammalian physiology, explains Benjamin Cravatt and Gabriel Simon at...

Deep under the Mediterranean Sea small animals have been discovered that live their entire lives without oxygen and surrounded by 'poisonous' sulphides. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Biology report the existence of multicellular organisms (new members of the group Loricifera), showing that they are alive, metabolically active, and apparently reproducing in spite of a complete absence of oxygen. Roberto Danovaro, from the Polytechnic University of Marche, Ancona, Italy, worked with a team of researchers to retrieve sediment samples from a deep hypersaline anoxic basin (DHABs) of the Mediterranean Sea and studied them for signs of life. "These...

ScienceDaily (Mar. 19, 2010) — Centuries ago, scientists began reducing the physics of the universe into a few, key laws described by a handful of parameters. Such simple descriptions have remained elusive for complex biological systems -- until now.Emory biophysicist Ilya Nemenman has identified parameters for several biochemical networks that distill the entire behavior of these systems into simple equivalent dynamics. The discovery may hold the potential to streamline the development of drugs and diagnostic tools, by simplifying the research models.

DEEP in your lungs, there's a battle raging. It's a warm, moist environment where the ever-opportunistic bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa has taken up residence. If your lungs are healthy, chances are the invader will be quickly dispatched. But in the mucus-clogged lungs of people with cystic fibrosis, the bacterium finds an ideal habitat. First, the microbes quietly multiply and then they suddenly switch their behaviour. A host of biochemical changes sticks the population of cells together, forming a gluey biofilm that even a potent cocktail of antibiotics struggles to shift. Microbes like P. aeruginosa were once thought of as disorganised renegades,...

Forget Jurassic Park. By successfully sequencing the DNA of a long-extinct species, Stephan Schuster and Webb Miller have helped push back the boundaries of molecular biology. Stephan Schuster was never all that interested in ancient DNA. As a young genomicist at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in his native Germany, his forte had always been bacteria. By deciphering and comparing the genomes -- the genetic blueprints -- of various microbial species, he sought to unlock the secrets of these ubiquitous creatures: how they evolve and interact with the organisms that play them host. Schuster’s early work had attracted...

An image from a TV ad for gay marriage, reproduced in the January 18 New Yorker, provides a Rorschach test for reactions to America’s ongoing revolution in family structure. Two men in black suits stand shoulder to shoulder in a group of people, looking into each other’s eyes. In their arms are two newborns in white baby clothes and blankets. Though it’s not immediately apparent from the photo, the men are at a baptism for their infants. The ad, still being test-marketed, is called “Family Values,” and is intended to emphasize the “conventionality of gay couples,” explains the New Yorker....

I stopped eating pork about eight years ago, after a scientist happened to mention that the animal whose teeth most closely resemble our own is the pig. Unable to shake the image of a perky little pig flashing me a brilliant George Clooney smile, I decided it was easier to forgo the Christmas ham. A couple of years later, I gave up on all mammalian meat, period. I still eat fish and poultry, however and pour eggnog in my coffee. My dietary decisions are arbitrary and inconsistent, and when friends ask why I’m willing to try the duck but not...

David Queller and Joan Strassmann, evolutionary biologists at Rice University, recently proposed a new way to describe what makes an organism a unified whole. They defined an organism as an entity made up of parts that cooperate well for an overall purpose, and do so with minimal conflict. But how do parts like these get together, and where does purposeful behavior come from?...

“Darwin’s finches” are a variety of small black birds that were observed and collected by British naturalist Charles Darwin during his famous voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle in the early 1800s. Years later, Darwin argued that subtle variations in their beak sizes supported his concept that all organisms share a common ancestor (a theory known as macroevolution). The finches, whose technical name is Geospiza, have since become classic evolutionary icons...

Dr. Henry M. Morris founded the Institute for Creation Research in 1970 with a vision to uncover and present evidence for the accuracy and authority of the Bible. For almost 40 years, ICR has distinguished itself as the leader in creation science research and education, ably assisted by the many fine scientists whom God has led to work here. These men and women have dedicated their training and skills to raising the banner for the truth of our Creator God. We would like you to meet our current on-site scientists and hear their thoughts on the purpose, significance, and importance...

Dec 3, 2009 — In the previous entry, Darwin inspired some geologists, even though he was wrong. Here are some news stories showing nature inspiring engineers with wonders right under their noses...

Human geneticists have reached a private crisis of conscience, and it will become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis has depressing health implications and alarming political ones. In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races. About five years ago, genetics researchers became excited about new methods for “genome-wide association studies” (GWAS). We already knew from twin, family and adoption studies that all human traits are heritable: genetic differences explain much of the variation...

Some tourists on a tundra buggy tour of the Churchill wildlife management area on Nov. 20 were shaken and started crying after witnessing a male polar bear eating a baby polar bear, said John Gunter, general manager for Frontiers North Adventures, an area tour operator.Eight cases of mature male polar bears eating baby bear cubs have been reported this year..... Infanticide [ Baby killing ] occurs among polar bears when they run low on fat reserves and become hungry enough to resort to cannibalism [and murder ]..... Scientists predict that with later formation of ice in the fall and earlier...

Evolutionists retreating from the arena of science --snip-- Today, the Darwinian scientific consensus persists within almost every large university and governmental institution. But around the middle of the 20th century an interesting new trend emerged and has since become increasingly established. Evolutionary theorists have been forced, step by step, to steadily retreat from the evidence in the field. Some of the evidences mentioned earlier in this article were demonstrated to be frauds and hoaxes. Other discoveries have been a blow to the straightforward expectations and predictions of evolutionists. Increasingly, they have been forced to tack ad hoc mechanisms onto Darwin’s...

Scientists have watched as a new species is “born”—or is that “evolved”?—on one of the Galapagos Islands, home of Darwin’s famous finches...

Amateur fossil hunters Jamie and Jonathan Hiscocks were looking for dinosaur remains in East Sussex, UK, when they instead found tiny spider webs trapped inside a piece of ancient amber. Oxford University paleobiologist Martin Brasier inspected the amber, which was assigned an age of over 100 million years. He concluded that spiders back then were able to spin webs just like today’s garden spiders.The amber-encased webbing formed concentric circles like those that contemporary orb-weaver spiders manufacture. Also evident were “little sticky droplets along the web threads to trap prey,� Brasier told the Daily Mail. He added, “You can match the...

Not to mince words - the modern synthesis is gone --snip-- "The discovery of pervasive HGT and the overall dynamics of the genetic universe destroys not only the tree of life as we knew it but also another central tenet of the modern synthesis inherited from Darwin, namely gradualism. In a world dominated by HGT, gene duplication, gene loss and such momentous events as endosymbiosis, the idea of evolution being driven primarily by infinitesimal heritable changes in the Darwinian tradition has become untenable." ...

Creationists are ‘liars' (?): Geologist Donald Prothero doesn’t like the fact that we don’t agree with his ideas on evolution. I love the attitude some evolutionists have toward professional, scientific debate. Because creationist scientists do not agree with their biased, subjective and unsubstantiated ideas they spit the dummy and call us liars. The latest tirade from geologist Donald Prothero is in an opinion piece in NewScientist entitled ‘Evolution: What missing link?’1 I like that title. His article was picked up by the Telegraph newspaper in the UK which reported, ‘Creationists “peddle lies about the fossil record�.’2 Lies? Are creationists really...

Darwinizing Everything --snip-- The Darwinians, who took over biology in the 19th century, are still busily engaged in mythmaking, comforting the feebleminded who accept their explanations as wisdom, denouncing the heretics who call their bluff. They wear S on their chests: Science, the equivalent of Superman in intellectual circles. They are phonies. Bring out the kryptonite of critical analysis. It scares them to death, even though they never had special powers to begin with...

Molecular biologist Michael Behe described a system made of several interacting parts, whereby the removal of one part would disrupt the functioning of the whole, as irreducibly complex. Both creation scientists and intelligent design proponents highlight examples of irreducible complexity in their studies. The very structure of these systems--with their interdependent parts working all together or not at all--demands design, not chance. Nevertheless, a team of evolutionary molecular biologists think they may have refuted irreducible complexity. They recently studied the parts of a particular cellular machine involved in protein transport, claiming that it was actually reducible to its component parts...

Knockout strategies have demonstrated that the function of many genes cannot be studied by disrupting them in model organisms because the inactivation of these genes does not lead to a phenotypic effect. For living systems, this peculiar phenomenon of genetic redundancy seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Genetic redundancy is now defined as the situation in which the disruption of a gene is selectively neutral. Biology shows us that 1) two or more genes in an organism can often substitute for each other, 2) some genes are just there in a silent state. Inactivation of such redundant...

Evolutionary philosophy is a bottom-up storytelling project: particles, planets, people. Naturalists (those who say nature is all there is) believe they can invent explanations that are free of miracles, but in practice, miracles pop up everywhere in their stories. This was satirized by Sidney Harris years ago in a cartoon that showed a grad student filling a blackboard with equations. His adviser called attention to one step that needed some elaboration: It said, "Then a miracle happens." Examples of miracles in evolutionary philosophy include the sudden appearance of the universe without cause or explanation, the origin of life, the origin...

"It sounds yucky, but it may be well worth doing if it's going to lead to a cure for something horrible," said Robin Lovell-Badge, a stem cell expert at Britain's National Institute for Medical Research, and a member of the group conducting the study. At a media briefing in London, Lovell-Badge said there were two main types of experiments: altering an animal's genes by adding human DNA or replacing a specific animal sequence with its human counterpart. Several years ago, human genes were added to a mouse to create a model of Down's syndrome for scientists to study how the...

Former Nature editor Philip Ball once commented that ‘there is no assembly plant so delicate, versatile and adaptive as the cell” (1). Emeritus Professor Theodore Brown chose to wax metaphorical by likening the cell to a fully-fledged factory, with its own complex functional relationships and interactions akin to what we observe in our own manufacturing facilities (2). In recent years the seemingly intractable problem of explaining how the first cell came into existence through chance events, otherwise known as the ‘Chance Hypothesis’, has become more acute than ever as scientists have begun to realize that a minimum suite of functional...