Genes

Boomtown Rats

Posted on July 2, 2009 at 12:01 am

I’m not just talking about a seminal punk-ish band. No, I’m using that as a pun so I can talk about blowin’ stuff up. What can I say? I’m a dude. We like to blow stuff up. It’s in our genes.

Which might go a long way toward explaining why it’s on the list of top holidays for my three little dudes. Just yesterday, Speed Racer was perusing the newspaper (searching for the comics. I can’t get him interested in the actual news of a newspaper. Yet.) when he ran across a story about fireworks being sold and sold a lot. He was, to say the least, a bit excited.

“Can we go there? To this place? They’ve got two for one. We can get a lot of fireworks. Can we go today? Right now?”

I had to calm him down a little. For one thing, it’s difficult to talk to someone when they’re clawing into the ceiling and running about like a hyperactive spider. For another, I knew I’d have to wait for his brother, Sarcasmo, to get home from his leadership camp. It would not be good if we were to go buy fireworks and leave Sarcasmo behind. I’d never hear the end of it.

Still, this is an event to which we all look forward. Me because it’s fun to watch all three little dudes pick out stuff to blow up. Them because, well, they’re picking out stuff to blow up.

Our favorites are mortars. Just because we love the thump as they launch and they really do look fantastic when they explode all the way up there in the air.

– Richard

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Freaky Friday: Glow-In-The-Dark Monkeys

Posted on May 29, 2009 at 12:01 am

Okay, let’s get one thing out of the way first: Monkeys are inherently funny. We love monkeys. The sillier the better. So. Monkeys good. Genetically enhanced monkeys? Even better. Giant genetically enhanced monkeys? Can’t be topped.

Unfortunately, I know we’re not going to talk about giant genetically enhanced monkeys. Just the plain vanilla genetically enhanced monkeys. That glow green under a special light. How cool is that?

Here’s a quick look at the marmosets.

SCIENCE-US-MONKEYS-GREEN

See? Cool.

Japanese researchers have genetically engineered monkeys whose hair roots, skin and blood glow green under a special light, and who have passed on their traits to their offspring, the first time this has been achieved in a primate.

They spliced a jellyfish gene into common marmosets, and said on Wednesday they hope to use their colony of glowing animals to study human Parkinson’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS.

Erika Sasaki and Hideyuki Okano of the Keio University School of Medicine in Japan used a virus to carry the gene for green fluorescent protein into monkey embryos, which were implanted into a female monkey, and four out of five were born with the gene throughout their bodies.

One fathered a healthy baby that also carried the new genes, they reported in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

The protein glows under blue and ultraviolet light, allowing researchers to illuminate tumor cells, trace toxins and to monitor genes as they turn on and off.

Okay, yeah, we’re talking a medical advancement that could mean a better life for a lot of people. Almost as important, though, would be this: GREEN MONKEYS!

Go, science!

Now if only we could get something like this approved for humans. I mean, imagine kids getting these sorts of genes. You wouldn’t have to turn on the light to find them outside at night, just flash a little ultraviolet at them, no need to disturb the neighbors. Oh, yeah, now we’re talking.

– Richard

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Ugh! Me Make Fire

Posted on February 15, 2009 at 12:01 am

Yes, all right, this has absolutely nothing to do with out stated mission, but I think it’s pretty cool. See, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea that in the relatively recent past, there was another species of hominid living on the planet, side by side with out ancestors. I’m talking about Neanderthals.

Until about 30,000 years ago, Neanderthals still lived in Europe and Asia. The current thinking is that our ancestors simply out competed our nearest relatives and wiped them off the map. Not necesssarily through wars, but because we were simply better at communicating, talking, hunting, making tools, that sort of thing. We got all the good grub and spread out. The Neanderthals didn’t and died out. Simple as that.

Here’s the deal, though. Apparently, scientists have finished completely mapping the Neanderthal genome, mostly from bones unearthed in Croatia, and found that Neanderthals shared with humans the gene associated with speech and language. Which means they could have talked just as well as what we’re laughingly calling modern humans.

After mapping the Neanderthal genome, the entire genetic sequence responsible for everything that happens in your body, the blueprint for how you develop and what you look like and how you function, it seems we share between 99.5 percent and 99.9 percent of genes. They were more like us than we thought. Because these human cousins lived around modern humans, there was some speculation there might have been intermixing of the two species. However, the recent study of the Neanderthal genome suggests otherwise.

And now they’re gone.

There’s just something so sad and poignant about all this. To think of the last of a nearly human race squatting over a meager meal, the last of its kind. Huddling alone in the dark, watching with envious eyes as true humanity emerges from the night, grasping a firey branch that lights its way into the light of day.

And then that Neanderthal driving the SUV cuts me off and I curse his name.

– Richard

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