Sandwalk

The key features of the mRNA vaccines are the use of modified nucleotides in their synthesis and the use of lipid nanoparticles to deliver t...

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

I've been complaining for years about how opponents of junk DNA misrepresent and distort the scientific literature. The same complaints ...

I was looking at the Vision and Change document the other day and it made me realize that very little has changed in undergraduate educatio...

The latest issue of New Scientist has a number of articles on evolution. All of them are focused on extending and improving the current the...

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 ...