Eclectic Living
Which statement most closely describes how you feel: 1. I care about all people (even if they're from another country), the environment, and the future of our planet. 2. I care about people (especially people from my country and people like me), the environment (especially my environment), and my kids. 3. I care about middle class Americans... Continue Reading →
Linnaeus probably couldn't have guessed that we would one day be able to classify organisms by sequencing and comparing large chunks of their genomes (since he didn't know what a genome was). That's what phylogenomics does, and it's leading to rapid advances in our understanding of how life evolved. In the late '90s, my dad... Continue Reading →
According to this Science blurb, American children are prescribed antibiotics 57% of the time for respiratory infections, which are only 27% bacterial, resulting in 11 million unwarranted antibiotic prescriptions each year. This is increasing antibiotic resistance and, the article fails to mention, wreaking unnecessary havoc with our good microbes.
Not to be too much of a grotesque, but even flu vaccines are affected by our gut microbiota. Science reports that certain bacteria in the gut increase the efficacy of the flu vaccine. Keep those guts healthy!
Score one for conspiracy theorists. Our minds are being controlled by outside forces - but Obama and DARPA aren't to blame.* In keeping with the theme that little critters have a lot more to do with our world than we thought, at least two of these (a protozoan and a virus) are widespread in humans and... Continue Reading →
As I've long surmised, lexiconic erudition has salubrious effects similar to sybaritism. Well, that's not exactly true, but you get the point. According to a new study, learning new words triggers feelings similar to those you get from having sex. Evolutionarily, this may have helped encourage language development. I wonder if learning in general also stimulates the... Continue Reading →
What if we could diagnose depression with a simple pin prick? According to an article in Science, this could become a reality soon, because depressed people tend to have different levels of certain RNA molecules in the blood. We probably all know someone who has experienced depression. Maybe understanding some of the markers of depression will... Continue Reading →
Not only do our armpits create odors, it turns out they can also detect odors. In fact, skin cells throughout our bodies have chemical receptors much like some of those in our noses. These receptors detect certain chemicals, triggering healing, defense, and other responses. This is yet another amazing way that our bodies interact with... Continue Reading →
A note from Poppa: I currently have 31 tabs open in my Google Chrome browser, and another few in Safari. A plurality of these are articles from Science Magazine - when I come across something interesting, or when I'm doing research, I'll keep the tab open until I can incorporate it into a post or otherwise... Continue Reading →
I had a dream last night that I was keeping dodo birds the way one might keep chickens. They had been resurrected, phoenix-style, through DNA lab work. I was excited to tell my stepmom - this would be a great bird to add to her life list. In the category of birds that have run afoul of man's... Continue Reading →
Poppa's Cottage 