Most people would be able to say that it was an impact by an enormous meteor that did for the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. I have written previously about the less commonly known vulcanism of the Deccan Traps which also played a likely sizeable role. Together, these two were responsible for wiping out 75%… Read More 16 Year Winter Finished The Dinosaurs
The arms of Tyrannosaurus rex have the become the stuff of legend. The butt of a million internet jokes about having short, useless arms the memes have become so prevalent that people are as likely to let out a laugh rather than a quiver of fear when they see one. New research presented at the… Read More Maybe T. rex’s Arms Wern’t So Useless After All?
Time for a bit of physics. You are probably aware that we cannot currently account for about 95% of the matter in the universe. Dark Matter and Dark Energy are the place holder names we use to describe the missing mass and energy until such time as we find them, which I’ve no doubt we… Read More Baryon Carry On Explained
As a follow up to last week’s post on CRISPR DNA editing, this week we have a story on the practical application of said technique. Celiac disease is the disorder where an individual is allergic to one of the components of gluten, -gliadins. These people make antibodies to the -gliadins and this causes inflammation of… Read More Genetics Offers a Workaround for Celiac Disease
It occurred to me that I’m a geneticist writing a science blog and I’ve never written about the phenomenon that is CRISPR/Cas9. Anyone vaguely interested in science, and I’m assuming that must include you, dear Reader, cannot have failed to hear about this technique which has taken the biomedical research field by storm in recent… Read More CRISPR: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
On this day in 1869 in County Tyrone, Ireland, a baby girl by the name of Mary was born. Certainly, there’s nothing unusual in that. Very little is known of the formative years of young Mary Mallon, but at the age of 15 she became a part of the Irish diaspora headed for the United… Read More “Typhoid” Mary Mallon
A matter of some controversy this week. You may have seen in the news lately that an ancient viking burial with all the trappings of an experienced warrior was shown to be that of a female. I first became aware of this story about a week ago when scientists in my Twitter feed started highlighting… Read More The Female Viking Warrior Controversy
Saturn. Truly, one of the most beautiful objects known to man. We’re lucky to have something in our solar system that is both so wonderful to look at and so scientifically informative. Twenty years ago we launched the Cassini-Huygens probe. After seven long years of space travel it became our first object in orbit of… Read More Saturnian Swan Song
Hey Science Fans! I’m back from a week off and ready to write so let’s get to it. You’ll no doubt remember the curious case of Tabby’s Star: a star about 1300 lightyears away that can very rapidly change its brightness in a way that has, thus far, defied explanation. Up to 20% of the… Read More Update On Tabby’s Star
This week, science fans, the small matter of life on Earth as we know it. You have probably heard of the Cambrian explosion, that point about 540 million years ago when multicellular life suddenly appears in the fossil record. For the previous 3 billion years or so all life on the planet had been comprised… Read More On Algae, And How They Terraformed The Earth
The Skeptilogicon 