Travellers on the New York and Boston subway systems might allow themselves a sigh of relief – Yersinia pestis (the causative agent of plague) and Bacillus anthracis (the causative agent of anthrax) might not be living in the subway systems after all. This is the finding of a new investigation published in the journal mSystems™, […]
Tag: DNA
Much to chew on about many meats
Mark A Jobling [pictured here] of the University of Leicester writes about the genetic underpinnings of exotic meats. His essay, called “Flogging a dead horse“, appears in the journal Investigative Genetics [2013, 4:5]: People eat mules, as well as donkeys and horses, and in meat contamination testing, mule meat would appear to be horsemeat, because of the […]
DNA Spit jewellery (a most personal gift for your Valentine?)
Now that Valentine’s day is rapidly approaching, have you considered presenting a romantic partner with some jewellery made from your spit? A research project at Aalto University, Finland suggests that you could. Oron Catts and Marika Hellman of the university’s Biofilia Lab explain: “First, some water is held in the mouth for a moment and […]
The human genome and the immortality of television sets
The ENCODE project (its stated goal is “to identify all functional elements in the human genome sequence“) has attracted much criticism. Dan Graur, a member of the Luxuriant Former Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS), and his colleagues made hearty contributions to that river of criticism: “On the immortality of television sets: ‘function’ in the human genome according to the evolution-free gospel […]