mssv

  • Mars beckons

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    It’s now just over a week until I go to Mars – or more accurately, to the Mars Society’s Mars Desert Research Station. Things are looking up – the Station took delivery of three new Kawasaki ATVs recently, and when I get there, the hab will have been in use for a month, meaning that…

  • Fun New Words

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    New words and terms I’ve heard at my lab: Fiascotorial, adj.: combinations or permutations of fiasco-like situations. e.g., “And then the squirrel fell into the bowl! Just imagine the fiascotorial possibilites!” Gene-jockey, n.: derogatory term for a geneticist or molecular biology. e.g., “Those gene-jockeys working on the squirrel genome project, they don’t understand that the…

  • Skwerls

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    1 comment on Skwerls

    During one of our classes today, we talked about the possible causes of Parkinson’s disease. One of the lecturers mentioned that in Kentucky, researchers thought they’d found a possible link between eating squirrel brains and Parkinson’s; 12 out of 42 people they surveyed with Parkinson’s ate squirrel brains, leading them to think that perhaps Parkinson’s…

  • Aloha

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    Alas and alack, &c, I haven’t been able to update much recently. I’ve just returned to Cambridge, which has been having unusually glorious weather, and have been unpacking various things. I’ve also been busy getting up to speed with the research project I’m doing this year, on (essentially) information processing in neurones. What this means…

  • Dancing

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    In case you’re interested, it might be worth checking out the BBC2 documentary The Dancer’s Body, on Saturday nights; I’m told it’s pretty good. An added bonus is that you should see Prof. Ramachandran on it either this week or next week, since he was interviewed for the programme while I was in the US.…

  • Probabilities

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    (Warning: Ramble ahead) Earlier today, I was listening to a guy describe a project I might do next year for neurobiology, trying to figure out some of the characteristics of Golgi neurones in the cerebellum. The way you can identify these neurones, other than looking at them under a microscope, is to insert a super-thin…

  • Menstrual cycle

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    Why is the lunar month exactly equal to the human female menstrual cycle? This is a question that came up in the New Mars forums, and if you click on the first link, it turns out that it is not exactly equal in the first place.

  • Firewalking

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    My answer to a firewalking question was published in today’s Notes and Queries section of the Guardian.

  • GM babies

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    To Enhance or Not To Enhance – I’m not sure why this guy talks about artificial chromosomes, I can think of several major reasons why this would is far from the best way of genetically altering embryos. Modification of the existing embryonic DNA would work better and in a more predictable manner.

  • Heart transplant

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    Gift of life for heart girl – exactly how do you donate a heart? They say that a donor came forward, but presumably the heart has to come from a deceased person of the same age.