This work was similar to my own MSc thesis:

Researchers at Rockefeller and Yale have used existing gene sequences for rhodopsin to produce a different version of that protein which may have been present in dinosaur eyes. Rhodopsin is an important molecule in vision. The researchers tested this pseudo-dino-rhodopsin and it most closely resembles the protein from present-day birds.

Who would have thought? :)

Recreation of an old dinosaur protein

Darwin said it first:

The Current Mass Extinction:

Human beings are currently causing the greatest
mass extinction of species since the extinction of
the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. If present trends
continue one half of all species on earth will be
extinct in 100 years. (For details see links below.)

MASS EXTINCTION UNDERWAY

Circadian clocks are the internal clocks used by all life to distinguish between day and night processes. For example, plant flowering is controlled by a circadian clock.

Researchers in Wisconsin have examined Arabidopsis knockouts (plants without a particular gene) for the ELF4 gene, and have determined that this gene is responsible for preventing early flowering in plants that don't get enough sun.

Another face of the circadian clock

In a paper published this week in the journal Nature Cell Biology, UC Berkeley molecular biologists describe a significant difference between the way normal and cancerous cells handle an enzyme called telomerase, which is critical to unrestricted cell growth. The enzyme maintains the telomeres that cap the ends of each chromosome, keeping them long enough so that DNA replication and cell division go without a hitch.

Funny, I didn't know that cancer cells treated telomerase any differently than normal cells did! Apparently they keep it active, all the time, when healthy cells segregate telomerase and only use it once per round of cell division.

Targeting Enzymes that Immortalize Cancer Cells

For all of us who never got to do it in high school!

This is kind of fun. You can do a hell of a lot with multi-media in an educational setting. I found multi-media animations of filter functions in DSP class to be incredibly insightful. Calculus is really a poor way of explaining things that are really very intuitive if you can see them in action. There is a lot of distance we can get out of something that seems so simple.

Dissect a Frog!