Sandwalk

Philip Ball is on a roll. He has published a new book plus several articles in popular magazines and he has appeared in a bunch of podcasts...

Should universities remove online courses that contain incorrect or misleading information? There are lots of scientific controversies...

Philip Ball has just published a new book "How Life Works." The subtitle is "A User’s Guide to the New Biology" and that...

The latest summary of the number of genes in the human genome gets the number of protein-coding genes correct but their estimate of the numb...

The correct definition of a molecular gene isn't difficult but getting it recognized and accepted is a different story. When writi...

C. David Allis died on January 8, 2023. You can read about his history of awards and accomplishments in the Nature obituary with the provo...

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 ...

This is a video published a few weeks ago where Jon Perry interviews Richard Dawkins. Jon Perry is the author of animations posted on his we...

A group of scientists, mostly from the University of Ghent 1 (Belgium), have posted a paper on bioRxiv. Lorenzi, L., Chiu, H.-S., Cobos, F...

Michael Behe has published a book containing most of his previously published responses to critics. I was anxious to see how he dealt with m...

The Central Dogma of molecular biology states ... ... once (sequential) information has passed into protein it cannot get out again (F....

Discussions about the meaning of the word "function" have been going on for many decades, especially among philosphers who love th...

Coronaviruses are RNA viruses, which means that their genome is RNA, not DNA. All of the coronaviruses have similar genomes but I'm sur...

Scientists have sequenced the genomes of modern domesticated chickens and compared them to the genomes of various wild pheasants in southern...

I've thought a lot about how to define the word "gene." It's clear that no definition will capture all the possibilities b...

De novo genes are new genes that arise spontaneously from junk DNA [ De novo gene birth ]. The frequency of de novo gene creation is impo...

It's difficult to know how many protein-coding genes there are in the human genome because there are several different ways of counting ...

This is the 2019 Killian lecture at MIT, delivered in April 2019 by Gerald Fink . Fink is an eminent scientist who has done excellent work o...

Splice variants are very common in eukaryotes. We know that it's possible to detect dozens of different splice variants for each gene wi...

If you look in the various databases you'll see that most human genes have multiple transcription start sites. The evidence for the exis...