Author Archive
Unusual HIV-Vaccine perplexes Scientists
Scared from the escalating HIV pandemia with 25 million dead people since 1981? Here’s a flicker of hope: a HIV vaccine phase III study performed in Thailand this year is yielding promising results while reducing the infection rate with 31% effectiveness.
31 percent, that’s not rip-roaring, but at least it’s a beginning. Rather stunning, however, is […]
Unicorn to be sequenced with 30x coverage
Man, mouse, Methanopyrus… and still counting the nucleotides. The genomes of 960 species have been sequenced by the end of July (as you can see on the relevant NCBI web page).
Out of all reason, however, the genomes of some relevant species were so far ignored by the scientific community. Just think of Crisensus bavaricus, of […]
Anthropologist stumbles over faked skulls
An incredible affair of faked skulls has found its inglorious end at a district court in Frankfurt, Germany. Reiner Protsch von Zieten, a previous highly respected professor of anthropology, was given an 18-month suspended sentence. Protsch had been debunked some years ago of systematically falsifying the dates of numerous major stone-age relics (see the Guardian […]
How to win a piece of the moon??
Space aficionados around the world are electrified by an announcement made by the New Scientist. On the front cover of the print copy’s issue from June 13th, 2009 the weekly science magazine attracts its readers with the following promise calling attention in a screaming yellow circle:
>> WIN! This piece of the moon <<
Wow! A real […]
Get your clone uncontaminated
It’s not unusual for a paternity test to reveal unpleasant truths about the kiddy (and its genitor).
The outcome of a Texas paternity test in May, however, wasn’t only unusual - it was crazy. Here’s the story.
A mother and her fiancĂ© decided to take a paternity test due to the puzzling different facial features of their […]
Lousy DNA analysis fools German police
The mysterious phantom killer the German police was searching after for years has finally been identified: it is a cotton swab. The photo below shows the wrongdoer after its arrest by a police investigator.
The search was extensive and sometimes extremely dangerous as you can see on this top secret snapshot taken by accident in 2004 […]
Brenner’s kidding
South African biologist Sydney Brenner is a scientific icon of the “Golden Age” of molecular biology. The 2002 Nobel prize laureate was one of the first people to see the Watson-Crick model of the structure of DNA in 1953 (he was working at the nearby Oxford University’s Chemistry Department at that time). In the course […]
Cool youtube movies #1
Tired of everyday’s boring lab routine? Let’s change the channel and take a look at YouTube where really cool stuff can be found, such as …
… the Large Hadron Rap (referring to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider) whose backup-dancers, ha-ha, prefer anonymity, according to the credits (and I know why they prefer it!).
A more comical clip […]
The most useful genome for committing a crime
What is the optimal qualification to get out of a tight spot after you have committed a crime? Coolness? Unscrupulousness? Brutality? Exceptional intelligence? Or stupid constables (LOL)?
The unexpected answer is that the optimal qualification for a thug to get away without punishment is to have the adequate, well, genome. No, dude, I am not speaking […]
The web’s most popular genes
Recently, your Mr. Gene was crouching in front of his good old computer when, all of a sudden, it crossed his mind to google the word, well, “gene”.
Having performed this, Mr. Gene proudly presents the ultimate Gene Ranking, powered by Google:
1) Placed 1st is Gene, Elsevier’s International Journal of Functional and Evolutionary Genomics. If you […]
