Sandwalk

New Scientist has devoted much of their September 26th issue to evolution, but not in a good way. Their emphasis is on 13 ways that we must...

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

Alan McHughen is the author of a recently published book titled DNA Demystified . I took issue with his stance on junk DNA [ More misconcept...

I'm actively following the views of most science writers on junk DNA to see if they are keeping up on the latest results. The latest boo...

The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) is a large-scale, and very expensive, attempt to map all of the functional elements in the human g...

The coronavirus life cycle is depicted in a figure from Fung and Liu (2019). See below for a brief description. The virus particle attaches...

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...

Cytokines are a diverse groups of small signal proteins that act like hormones to turn on genes in blood cells and cells of the immune syste...

By the end of chapter 3, readers will be familiar with two main lines of evidence for junk DNA: the C-Value Paradox, and the fact that most ...

I had to completely reorganize chapter 2 in order to move population genetics closer to the beginning of the book and reduce the number of w...

My book is progressing slowly. The main task is to reduce it to about 120,000 words and that's proving to be a lot more difficult that I...

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

I just found this video that was posted to YouTube on May 2019. It's produced by the University of California and it features three rese...

This post is about a recent review of alternative splicing published by my colleague Ben Blencowe in the Dept. of Medical Genetics at the U...