Category Archives: Biochemistry

Cloning, Hubris and the Dino-DNA “Use By” Date

Be careful what your wish for. Photo by MathKnight and Zachi Evenor.

We know surprisingly little about juvenile dinosaurs, so every time a paleontologist uncovers a clutch of eggs or embryos, it is cause for celebration – at least until someone in the media gets hold of the story and asks The Dreaded Question: “Is Jurassic Park only a few years away?” or some variant thereof.

Being a member of said media, I am occasionally assigned one of these stories. And, although I don’t much care for sensationalism in science coverage, I’m generally too thrilled to be researching dinosaurs and cloning to complain very much. Instead, I see it as an opportunity to tell a deeper story, like this one.

Could we resurrect dinosaurs from fossil embryos?

Weighing in on Digital Scales

A truck in Tanzania drives onto a truck scale
A truck scale in Tanzania. Photo by Jan Hoffmann.

Whether they are weighing train cars, big rigs or vegetables in your local grocery, scales are the engines that drive global commerce. Without them, there could be no trade, and laboratories and pharmaceutical companies would have to dream up other ways to assay, mete and dose. Yet most of us are oblivious to the physical laws and clever engineering that go into these pivotal devices. It’s time to weigh in on…

How Digital Scales Work

For green energy, there’s no place like loam

Diagram of PMFC
Diagram by KVDP

Petroleum use is rife with environmental and security issues, and first-generation biofuels fall well short of carbon neutrality. Moreover, as global food crops literally lose ground to biofuel production, mounting scarcity is driving up food prices, increasing global hunger and political instability.

But what if we could have our rice and burn it, too? What if we could derive energy from crops without killing them, or generate power using plants and land not needed for food, all through the power of microbes?

How Plant-microbial Fuel Cells Work

Fecal transplants: One man’s trash…

C. diff photo
Scanning electron micrograph of C. diff, courtesy CDC

Accepting a transplant of someone else’s stool might sound extreme, but it might just be the next big thing in medicine, thanks in part to a potentially deadly stomach bug called Clostridium difficile.

C. diff, an emerging epidemic in hospitals and nursing homes that tears through the gut like Sherman through Georgia, has grown increasingly virulent and antibiotic-resistant in recent years. For many sufferers, fecal microbiota transplantation offers hope when all else fails. Can we get over the “ick factor” when our lives are on the line? You bet we can.

How Fecal Transplants Work

The scandalous sneeze

Fred Ott's Sneeze (film by William K.L. Dickson)
Fred Ott’s Sneeze

The 1894 kinetoscope of Fred Ott sneezing after inhaling a pinch of snuff, taken by Thomas Edison’s laboratory, was one of the first human acts ever committed to film. If you believe the internet rumors concerning the relationship between sneezing and sex, it might also have been the first movie orgasm.

No wonder nasal snuff was so popular for hundreds of years – and small wonder, too, that Pope Urban VIII threatened to excommunicate Catholics who took snuff in church….

Is Sneezing Really Like an Orgasm?