By Belle Moyers
It turns out that what your ancestors ate can influence your ideal diet. At least, that’s what researchers at Cornell University and the University of Pune, in India, have announced after analyzing several hundred peoples’ genomes and blood samples in the United States and India.
Continue reading “The “FADS2” diet: How vegetarian populations have different genomes”By Christina Vallianatos
We live in an age where oversharing is overabundant. From your best friend’s artsy food pictures (#boozybrunch), to your coworker live-Tweeting her labor experience (“C-section in 20 minutes!”), it seems like we know the intimate details of everyone’s lives, all the time.
But what if some of those TMI moments weren’t necessarily “too much information”? What if they’re actually helping to solve one of the biggest dilemmas in human genetics: the identification of disease-causing genes?
Continue reading “Science and social media: How “oversharing” is helping human genetics”
In 1917, almost a century ago, a French-Canadian scientist, Felix d’Herelle, and his colleagues discovered bacteriophage. As I discussed in a previous post, bacteriophage (phage) are the viruses that prey on bacteria, turning them into viral factories. The battle between phage and bacteria has raged for millennia, resulting in a beautiful co-evolution where predator and prey each grapple for a temporary upper hand.
We’ve been exploring the depths of this complex relationship, searching for ways to use this enemy of our enemy as a tool against the bacterial infections that plague us. Along the way, we’ve found a number of different techniques to exploit these micro-allies.
MiSciWriters is proud to partner with the UM Center for Microbial Systems to provide live coverage of the 2016 Michigan Meeting “Unseen Partners: Manipulating Microbial Communities that Support Life on Earth.” In lieu of our traditional Tuesday post, we will be live-blogging the event at the links below, and live-tweeting from @MiSciWriters during the following times:
We hope you’ll join in the conversation by commenting on the blog, or tweeting with the hashtag #MiMicrobe. Enjoy!
Update: Live blogging coverage is released as an event unfolds, placing the posts in reverse-chronological order. So if you want to read everything, start from the bottom of the page.
Monday, May 16 Coverage – https://misciwriters.com/portfolio/michigan-meeting-2016-monday/
Tuesday, May 17 Coverage – https://misciwriters.com/portfolio/michigan-meeting-2016-tuesday/
Wednesday, May 18 Coverage – https://misciwriters.com/portfolio/michigan-meeting-2016-wednesday/
By Belle Moyers
When talking about scientific issues, the phrase “Correlation doesn’t imply causation” is sometimes thrown around. But what does it mean? Science makes statements about cause and effect. Smoking causes lung cancer. Carbon emissions cause climate change. Higher temperatures cause increased violence. Clearly, scientists have some way of inferring causal relationships. But how do they grapple with the idea that “Correlation doesn’t imply causation”? If they don’t use correlation, what tools do they use to infer causation?
Continue reading “Science behind-the-scenes: Correlation and causation”By Irene Park
Life can be exciting sometimes, but it can also just be downright stressful. The dinner event that took me two weeks to plan is attended by only a quarter of the people on the guest list, my to-do list never gets shorter, my car suffers yet another bump in the parking lot, and so on.
There are many ways that I deal with stress—such as exercising, listening to music, and hanging out with friends. But I have one secret way to de-stress that I usually don’t talk about at work: watching videos or looking at pictures of cute animals, like this one or this one, that melt my heart and force me to let out a huge “awwwww.”
By Belle Moyers
In the film Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, there is a scene where the quartet of male leads is screaming at their boss. They are outraged over the hiring of a woman for the position of news anchor. At one point, David Koechner’s character leans forward over the desk and announces:
“It is anchorMAN, not anchorLADY, and THAT IS A SCIENTIFIC FACT!”
Continue reading “Science behind-the-scenes: “And that is a scientific FACT!””By Alison Ludzki
April is a natural fit for Stress Awareness Month, playing host to inevitable final exams and tax season. But is there a way to avoid the stress that comes along with them?
Stress means different things to different people, making it hard to define. Most importantly, stress is a hormonal response to danger. However, stress can also occur in response to not-so-dangerous occasions in our day-to-day lives, including routine events like work, family interactions, and other daily responsibilities. When these stressors are ongoing, they can have physical and mental health consequences. Continue reading “Don’t sweat the small stuff: Exercise is Medicine® for stress relief”
By Shirley Lee
Featured image: Induced pluripotent stem cells stained red, their nuclei are stained blue. Source.
When I was first taught the process of embryonic development in biology class back in high school, I was amazed by the complexity of the process. Each one of us was derived from a single cell (the result of the joining of an egg and a sperm), which then went through countless cell divisions. It amazes me that something so small is packed with so much biological potential!
Naturally, scientists set out to get to the bottom of this phenomenon. In the 1990s, people discovered how to extract these cells (called stem cells) from developing human embryos in order to study the process underlying stem cell development in research laboratories. Continue reading “Induced stem cell power: The power to reset a cell’s career path”
By Belle Moyers
Do you remember being taught the “Scientific Method” in school? There were always slight variations, but it went something like:
These steps seem like a great tool to introduce students to science. They’re simple and easy to understand once the teacher explains words like “hypothesis” and “experiment”. If you’re like me, perhaps you remember it seeming straightforward—scientists follow a linear set of steps that produce powerful results. Teachers drilled that method into us grade after grade. If only they weren’t completely wrong.
Continue reading “Science behind-the-scenes: (Almost) Everything grade school taught you about science is wrong”
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