Sandwalk

Wikipedia has a way of assessing the quality of articles that have been posted and edited. The rankings are somewhat confusing and it’s hard...

On Sept. 5, 2012 ENCODE researchers, in collaboration with the science journal Nature , launched a massive publicity campaign to convince th...

The ENCODE article on Wikipedia is a pretty good example of how to write a science article. Unfortunately, there are a few issues that will ...

Here's a recent video podcast (Aug. 23, 1022) from the Institute for Creation Research (sic). It features an interview with Dr. Jeff To...

ENCODE has mostly abandoned it's definition of function based on biochemical activity and replaced it with "candidate" functio...

The Wikipedia article on the Human genome contained a reference that I had not seen before. "Finally DNA that is deleterious to th...

A recent paper in Nature claims that 75% of synonymous mutations reduce fitness in yeast. The results were challenged (refuted?) ten weeks ...

NPR tweeted out a summary of the new CDC (United States) guidelines on COVID-19. The figure was posted under the name of Dr. Marcus Plescia,...

There has been an enormous expansion of papers on cancer and many of them make a connection with a particular human gene. A recent note in T...

The most important issue in alternative splicing, in my opinion, is whether splice variants are due to splicing errors (= junk RNA) or wheth...

Just before getting banned from Wikipedia , I was about to deal with a claim on the Intergenic region article. I had already fixed most of ...

My account on Wikipedia has been blocked by some editor named Bbb23 after receiving a complaint from another editor named Praxidicae . Prax...

I used to think that Wikipedia was a pretty good source of information even for scientific subjects. It wasn't perfect, but most of the ...

We've known for more than half-a-century that a lot of noncoding DNA is functional. Why are some people still surprised? It's a puzz...

Functional DNA is best defined as DNA that is currently under purifying selection. In other words, it can't be deleted without affecting...