Couldn't have said it better myself. Some of the most common antibiotics (Penicillin and beta-lactam derivatives) affect the peptidoglycan crosslinks in bacterial cell walls, making it so the cells can't divide and maintain their cell walls. This doesn't have anything to do with human-specific pathenogenicity (is…

Even if there were evidence in support of the aquatic ape hypothesis (of which there is not much) we certainly didn't evolve from dolphins, as the title seems to suggest. Cetaceans, if I remember correctly, are a lot more closely related to hippos and pigs than they are to primates.

This isn't terribly surprising. Plants can cause some pretty drastic changes to their genomes when under stress. Researchers have seen them rearrange their mitochondrial genomes, create heritable epigenetic changes, and de-regulate the activity of transposable elements in response to stress. Also, when plants…

Yeah. Some of the errors do creep in from enzyme malfunction, when they just pick up the wrong nucleotide. They are little machines really, and sometimes they jam; there's not really any higher thought behind it.

Well, it depends on the situation. During meiotic recombination, DNA is swapped between sister chromatids, which is a pretty involved process. Occasionally, one of the enzymes or structural proteins fouls up, and a bit of the DNA is accidentally degraded by exonucleases or non-homologous end joining. This is…

Yes, more or less. A lot of the time it's random or accidental. Damage during meiosis, an error in DNA replication, or the insertion of a transposable element. Usually, if it breaks the gene, the organism dies. If the mutation is neutral or beneficial, the organism lives to pass on the mutation.

So the freaky robot head on top kinda gave me the creeps, but I gave them my money anyway. Being able to actually communicate with another species in a pretty direct manner like that has always been a pretty cool idea to me, so I hope it works out for them.

A way to predict, from the amino acid sequence, what a fully folded protein product would look like. Right now we are stuck doing comparisons with established crystal structures, and some proteins are REALLY hard to crystallize.

It would be really interesting to see what kind of photosynthesis is going on in the plants/animals there. The photons that would be available to be absorbed would be much lower energy than the ones used by plants here, so they'd have to find a different collection system to use them. There are bacteria on earth…

I'd say go for it. Treat them well, learn as much as you can, and enjoy the company. This would be the first ever non-human intelligence (arguments about cetaceans and such aside, it would be harder to argue with a Neandertal since it can argue back in the language of your choice) we've ever met, and I've always…

We didn't "evolve past" Neandertals any more than we evolved past monkeys - they are phylogenetically divergent. Evolution does not have a goal in mind, so a species going extinct just means it was poorly suited to its environment, not that it has some moral reason to be gone. One could argue that being poorly…

Finding agronomically relevant traits for the tsunami damaged region is pretty cool, but the real brilliance in this paper is in the technique they use. Normal TILLING populations are great but it's a real challenge to find the specific mutation responsible for whatever phenotype you are seeing. By using the M2…

According to the entries on the blog, they used the same technique for extracting DNA that the person who originally wrote the paper did. Given that it's a standard phenol-chloroform extraction, I don't see why it would favor phosphate over arsenic.

The probe itself is clean, they are doing this to keep the upper stage of the motor (which is not clean) away from Mars.

This problem doesn't lie with the modified corn, it lies with the farming practices that the people who plant this corn are using. If you plant any crop, no matter how robust, in a year after year monoculture, you are going to cause pests to arise that are capable of eating it.

I'm not terribly familiar with the HOX genes (I'm a plant guy) but from that paper you linked, I have to say it's way freaky that the gene order corresponds to the location of expression (3' is anterior and 5' is posterior) and the order of expression, with 3' expressed first and 5' expressed last. That sort of…

Sadly the article itself is a brief and not a full paper, but they did sequence the whole genome to 26x coverage, so there went my first thought that the genes were just under-represented in the transcriptomic analysis.

Master of the Five Magics, by Lyndon Hardy. Probably one of the fantasy novels out there with the most well-clarified rules for magic, IMHO. Great book too, but I didn't dig the sequel as much.

Your wish is my command!

It's kind of ridiculous to argue that these places are doing work that competes with private industry. Genome sequencing projects are the sort of things that require significant infrastructure investment without the promise of immediately applicable results. Plants in particular can be very difficult to sequence…