This is another archival repost from the old blog, originally written in oct 2007. Evolution, from the point of view of the geneticist, is the change in allele frequencies that occurs in populations over time. New alleles are created by random mutation, and others slowly disappear through natural selection or […]
This is another archival repost, this time from oct 2007. The post is part two in a series. The series so far can be found here. Knowing how and why things go wrong tells us a lot about how and why things work when they go right. Indeed, this is […]
This is another archival repost, originally from oct 2007. Are you an addict? I bet you are (I saw you gambling addicts coming!). It might be coffee, chocolate, or tobacco, rather than alcohol, heroin, or self-harm, and you might not be wasting away because of it, but you’re probably addicted […]
This is an archive of a piece originally published on the old blog in 2007. A particular interest of mine is cell signalling. This is the field of molecular biology that looks at how biochemical events in the cell go on to cause responses elsewhere in the same cell, and […]
This is another archival repost from the old blog, originally from oct 2007. It’s not healthy to bottle up your worries and stress. That’s why all the best comedy throughout the ages has dealt with the tough issues that worry us. It’s why doctors make jokes about diseases and pathologists […]
This is another repost originally written for the old blog in 2007. Over the next few years or decades, traditional antibiotics will largely be replaced by bacteriophages. Like everything in biology and medicine, this is ultimately down to evolution. Pathogenic bacteria are alive: they reproduce, with slight imperfections, and are […]
This is another archival repost originally written for the old blog in oct 2007. In an episode of Friends, Ross and Phoebe have a somewhat implausible argument about Evolution. The argument ends with Ross conceding a point about probability and the inability to prove anything outside of mathematics (of course, […]
This is another archival repost of something originally written for the old blog in Oct 2007. I apologise for the half-hearted post. I had hoped to write a lot more, but was foiled by migraine, and ran into the deadline: today is “Blog Action Day“! New words are created every […]
From the cult of the amateur to the triumph of miscellanea, a revolution in how we interact with information is in its early stages. I don’t use the term “revolution” lightly. You could be forgiven for thinking it hyperbolic, because traditional publishers have been slow on the uptake. If you […]