misciwriters Biology, genetics, Research

X: A reason calico cats xist.

By Shirley Lee

 

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Samantha. Image credit: Shirley Lee

Last year, I decided to add a new member to my family, which at the time consisted of simply yours truly (well, other members of the family do exist but live hundreds of miles from Ann Arbor). After some searching, I brought an orange tabby cat back to my apartment and named her Samantha (pictured at the top). Samantha is a domestic shorthair, with faint mackerel markings along the sides of her body. Her forehead bears the classic “M” pattern characterizing a tabby cat. She also has four stripy legs, pink paw pads, and an orange stripy tail. When I introduced her to my family back home, she wasted no time in conquering everyone with that fuzzy face!

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misciwriters Opinion, Research, science behind the scenes, Science education

How fireflies illuminated our understanding of the world

By Noah Steinfeld

In the early 1950s at Johns Hopkins University, William E. McElroy, a young professor, wanted to figure out what makes fireflies glow. He would pay a quarter to children in the Baltimore area for every 100 fireflies they brought him. McElroy was regarded as a curiosity in the community: the stereotype of an eccentric scientist. But what these people didn’t know was that as a result of this research, McElroy would one day create a tool that would revolutionize the way scientists do biological research.

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misciwriters Biology, Cancer, Disease research, Public health, Research

The relationship between cancer and aging: Why it is relevant

By Irene Park

At first glance, aging and cancer are polar opposites. Many people will think of aging as growing old and dying. Cancer, on the other hand, is tumors and abnormal, uncontrolled cell growth.

But aging and cancer have more in common than we might think.  Both cancerous and aged cells show genome instability – an increased tendency of mutations to occur in your genome. There are multiple factors that lead to genome instability, but we will focus on how gene mutation arise, which is a permanent error in genes.

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