Few animal species reproduce with male pregnancy with examples including seahorses and some fish. Until recently, there were no records of male mammals giving birth. The phenomenon was not natural – male rats were surgically prepared to nurture a embryos in a transplanted uterus. The project yielded a low 4% success rate, but the male […]
My undergrad instructors would tell stories of dipping their whole arm, uncovered, into tubs of formalin. They said that the worst part was the smell, but there may have been other harmful effects that originally went unnoticed. While there are many uses for formaldehyde, especially formaldehyde since it’s a precursor to many types of resins […]
We obviously now know to stay away from radioactive materials – people know not to eat too many bananas because eating many millions of bananas can give you radiation poisoning. But radium, discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie, was a health fad in the 1920’s. Like how kombucha is popular now, there were […]
Rachel Carson is the author of Silent Spring, a book that revealed how humans are inadvertently destroying nature. It actually led to a bunch of regulations to help conserve nature, including the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).She went to college for English then received a Ph.D in zoology from Johns Hopkins. Throughout grad […]
“You should spend more time thinking about the clinical significance of your project.” – a comment I received while presenting my research proposal. Finding relevance to your research is great for getting funding, but if money isn’t a concern then maybe conduct more exploratory research:A study from 2018 found that many impactful medication (80% of […]
While mammals come in a range of colors, birds, reptiles, plants, and fungi cover a wider color spectrum. So we’re stuck having to bleach and dye our hair if we wanted to mimic the colors of bluebirds and paint our lips to attain a color of a toucan’s beak. Which leads us to: why do […]
Saliva! There are so many molecules that make up your saliva. Did you know? Saliva has all sorts of enzymes for helping with digestion, and many may be from bacteria, not our glands! [1] (Apparently, studying the saliva is sometimes called “salivaomics,” and there are some cool research here, like using saliva as an indicator […]
Last year, I heard about cases of human hibernation. The applications of this ranged from use during surgeries to space travel (apparently NASA is interested in this topic for its potential, like sleeping to Mars!). Anyway, I stumbled across this blog post while searching for accidental instances of human hibernations and it’s fantastic: http://inhumanexperiment.blogspot.com/2010/03/curious-case-of-human-hibernation.html (this […]
pork tapeworm or Taenia solium is a type of worm that can end up in your brain. It infects via fecal-oral contract so infection is higher in developing countries with poor hygiene (parasites spread when tapeworm egg infested foods or water are consumed). If the parasite larvae cysts enter the nervous system, then it’s called […]
DNA can jump around. These segments of DNA that move around within the genome are called “transposons.” When the human genome project was completed, >45% of our genome was found to contain DNA segments from transportable elements [1]. Insertion rates of transposons can be estimated, which revealed a varying rate with several peaks throughout primate […]
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