Public and scientific understandings of genes

Via  Lena Groeger, writing at Scienceline: An Austrian monk sits alone with his garden pea plants, recording if they’re yellow, green, round or wrinkly. He starts noticing simple patterns in how various traits appear in each generation: a yellow parent often produces yellow offspring, but two yellow parents can produce green offspring, and yellowish-green offspring simply [...]

A new (which is to say very old, but recently discovered) human ancestor?

Ewen Callaway writing in Nature News: The ice-age world is starting to look cosmopolitan. While Neanderthals held sway in Europe and modern humans were beginning to populate the globe, another ancient human relative lived in Asia, according to a genome sequence recovered from a finger bone in a cave in southern Siberia. A comparative analysis [...]

Is the As-bacterium overhyped? ctd

Carl Zimmer, writing in Slate, considers the evidence: None of the scientists I spoke to ruled out the possibility that such weird bacteria might exist. Indeed, some of them were co-authors of a 2007 report for the National Academies of Sciences on alien life that called for research into, among other things, arsenic-based biology. But [...]

Is the As-bacterium overhyped?

Obnoxious-even-when-he’s-right atheist and University of Minnesota Morris biologist PZ Myers says “yes.”  The Weiner sequence, it appears, has played out again. My own speculation that the bacterium might represent the trunk of a new evolutionary tree does now seem, as I expected, reckless. The piece is long, but non-technical, so bear with us. Here’s the [...]

More on the As-bacterium discovery

It’s probably not good that I’m getting this much of my science news through Gawker outlets, but io9′s Alasdair Wilkins provides a sober rundown of NASA’s latest bombshell. One member of the panel that made the announcement, Dr. James Elder, an expert on phospherus, talked about potential industrial application of the bacteria:   [Elder said] arsenic-based [...]

Newly discovered bacteria redefines possibilities of biochemistry

What can life be made of? Stanislaw Lem imagined beings made of ice, of uranium, and of precious gems. Now, NASA scientists have discovered organisms made of arsenic. Via Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz: NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. [...]