A paper released in Nature this week had all the elements of a good science story. An odd little plant called a carnivorous bladderwort was found to have almost none of the so-called junk DNA that makes up the bulk of other...
Category: genomics
A paper released in Nature this week had all the elements of a good science story. An odd little plant called a carnivorous bladderwort was found to have almost none of the so-called junk DNA that makes up the bulk of other organisms’ genomes. The human genome is more than 98% noncoding “junk.”
This pretty little killer plant offered a nice hook for delving into what has become one of the more contentious debates in biology – what does all this noncoding DNA do, if anything?
I thought more people would pick up on the story, but the Nature press materials didn’t include it among the findings that got a blurb. At LiveScience, Tia Ghose covered it, and her story got picked up on a number of other news sites, including NBCnews.com.
But the story is...
Few creatures stir the imagination like the coelacanth. Scientists thought it had been extinct for millions of years, and then in the 1930s, a specimen seemed to have swum from the Devonian right into a fisherman’s net.
Now scientists have finally sequenced the genome of this elusive, primitive looking...
Few creatures stir the imagination like the coelacanth. Scientists thought it had been extinct for millions of years, and then in the 1930s, a specimen seemed to have swum from the Devonian right into a fisherman’s net.
Now scientists have finally sequenced the genome of this elusive, primitive looking creature to find out how slowly it’s really evolved, and to discern its relationship to those fish that dragged themselves onto land and became our ancestors. The news was announced in a paper in Nature.
At the LA Times, Eryn Brown covered the advance in this story, which told us that it was difficult to get DNA from this highly endangered fish but not how they finally did it. How does one go about getting a DNA sample from a five-...
[Update: adds mention of Time magazine story.]
A team of researchers who analyzed genetic data on 33,000 people with mental illness and 28,000 controls discovered that the five most common mental illnesses--depression, autism, attention-deficit disorder, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder--share...
[Update: adds mention of Time magazine story.]
A team of researchers who analyzed genetic data on 33,000 people with mental illness and 28,000 controls discovered that the five most common mental illnesses--depression, autism, attention-deficit disorder, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder--share some of the same genetic abnormalities.
The finding, while it does not immediately lead to better treatment for any of these severe illnesses, does move researchers closer to understanding their causes. As Lauran Neergaard wrote for the AP:
"These disorders that we thought of as quite different may not have such sharp boundaries," said Dr. Jordan Smoller of Massachusetts General Hospital, one of the lead researchers for the international study appearing in The Lancet.
...
My favorite story of the day so far: Efficacy of Tobacco Taxes Tied to Gene Type, by Nicholas Bakalar of The New York Times.
I suppose we could take this too far and...
My favorite story of the day so far: Efficacy of Tobacco Taxes Tied to Gene Type, by Nicholas Bakalar of The New York Times.
I suppose we could take this too far and note that policy makers, accustomed to regulating government, business, and individuals, should reconize that they are also regulating genotypes. And when the Senate considers Susan Rice's possible nomination as Secretary of State, perhaps it should demand to see her genome. (As I write this, it occurs to me that today's nonsensical crack is sometimes tomorrow's reality.)
The Times treated this story as a novelty item, publishing a 240-word piece in the back pages of Science Times. I would have done much more.
Admittedly, the study's...
Research is bubbling up from Australia today that researchers at the University of Melbourne have devised a genetic test to predict autism. Several of the early stories say it in slightly different ways, but nobody seems to get it quite right.
Reuters...
Research is bubbling up from Australia today that researchers at the University of Melbourne have devised a genetic test to predict autism. Several of the early stories say it in slightly different ways, but nobody seems to get it quite right.
Reuters leads with "Australian scientists have developed a genetic test to predict autism spectrum disorder in children..." A story on the website of ABC, the Australian radio and television network, runs under the headline "Researchers develop genetic test for autism." Would that it were so.
A press release from the University of Melbourne, which presumably gave rise to the coverage, confounds...
A few items from this morning's menu:
At the Christian Science Monitor, Peter Spotts compares the situation of Voyager 1 to that of a child on a long car...
A few items from this morning's menu:
At the Christian Science Monitor, Peter Spotts compares the situation of Voyager 1 to that of a child on a long car trip asking, "When will we get there?" The spacecraft is supposed to be getting close to what's called the heliopause--the boundary between the farthest reach of the solar wind and the surrounding interstellar wind. But it's still not there, leaving theorists grasping for explanations.
The AP's Alicia Chang gives us a nice write-up of NASA's Dawn spacecraft as it "spiraled away" from the asteroid Vesta toward the dwarf planet Ceres, on its way toward completing its...
I posted earlier on the late-August study adding new evidence to the link between older fathers and autism and other ailments, and Deborah Blum...
I posted earlier on the late-August study adding new evidence to the link between older fathers and autism and other ailments, and Deborah Blum posted on a story looking at the implications for the human gene pool. But there is, I think, one more thing to say about the coverage.
The study received wide attention, even though this link has been clear for years. Most of the coverage missed what was new about this study, which did indeed add significant evidence to what had already been known. But something very important was largely missed. And I count that as a general failure of the press.
Much of the coverage was simply silly, amounting to this: OK, men, now you have to worry about your biological clocks, too! ...
The summer heat must be affecting the brains of some science writers, if recent stories are any indication. Perhaps one of the little-noted consequences of global warming--if indeed it's partly responsible for this summer's drought and heat--is its effect on human neurons.
Case in point: Seth...
The summer heat must be affecting the brains of some science writers, if recent stories are any indication. Perhaps one of the little-noted consequences of global warming--if indeed it's partly responsible for this summer's drought and heat--is its effect on human neurons.
Case in point: Seth Borenstein and Alicia Chang of the AP, two stalwarts who can usually be counted on for solid reporting and clear writing, have turned in a piece on the new Mars rover, Curiosity, that says little about Mars but instead talks about Mohawk Guy, Elvis Guy, and "seven minutes of terror." See what I mean? When science writers start churning out copy on hair styles, you know something is wrong. They write:
Known to the Twitterverse and the president of the United States...
The teaser for Matt Ridley's...
The teaser for Matt Ridley's post in last week's Wall Street Journal sounded great:
Can Genes Explain the Sex Divide?
Matt Ridley explores the thought that some of our sex differences might be caused by our culture as well as our genes.
That's an interesting question, and Ridley seemed the ideal candidate to explore it. He's a good writer, a best-selling author, and a scientist, and he's written about...
Alert the media: Glenn Close has had her genome sequenced!
Who cares?
I do. I've...
Alert the media: Glenn Close has had her genome sequenced!
Who cares?
I do. I've been scared of Glenn Close ever since Fatal Attraction, so I'm eager to see whether the reporting on her genome will ease my fears.
The news comes to us by way of a press release from Illumina, Inc. of San Diego, the genomics company that unraveled Close's double helix. The company says Close is the first "named female" to have her genome sequenced. ("Publicly identified" would have been better; I doubt that anyone has sequenced a female who is un-named.)
The first...
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