The Monkey Snuggle Market: How Much for a Quick Nuzzle?
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
Select Category Select Tag Select Archive ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
New Bragging Rights for Pluto? It May Be the Biggest Dwarf Planet
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
Pluto’s dinky diameter wasn’t the official reason it was demoted from the planetary club back in 2006, but symbolically, size was the last straw. When Caltech astronomer Mike Brown spotted the object we now call Eris back in 2005 and astronomers figured it to be larger than Pluto, the former ninth planet’s fate was sealed. Now Pluto’s reclassification as a “dwarf planet” and the subsequent public outcry is behind us, but new research suggests that the former p ...read more
Going Direct: Researchers Change Skin Into Blood With No Stops in Between
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
It may not be as miraculous as turning water into wine, or as wealth-generating as turning dirt into gold, but we still think this is a very cool trick: Researchers have transformed mature skin cells directly into mature blood cells. Crucially, this was done without reverting the cells to a flexible, “pluripotent” stage in which the cells can grow into any form. The technique, described in Nature, could lead to lab-grown blood cells for transfusions and transplants for people with bo ...read more
Big Confusion on Climate Science Communication vs. Activism
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
The Los Angeles Times story about climate scientists fighting back has gotten tons of attention today–but it’s misleading. It combines together multiple activities and makes it sound like they’re centered at the American Geophysical Union. That’s not the case and the AGU has put out a press release to clarify: An article appearing in the Los Angeles Times, and then picked up by media outlets far and wide, misrepresents the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and a climate s ...read more
What intra- & inter- population genetic variance tells us
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
The figure to the left is a composite merged from two different papers. One analyzes the patterns of genetic variation within African Americans, and the other the patterns within the East Turkic ethnic group, the Uyghurs. The bar plots show the ancestral element which is similar to two parent populations which resemble Europeans and Africans or East Asians. Looking at total aggregate ancestral quanta we infer that African Americans are on the order of 15-25% European in ancestry, and 75-85% Afri ...read more