A few of our about 30,000 genes are absurdly long, perhaps a tenth of a mm of DNA for a single gene. This is pretty long, the genes are in a nucleus less than a hundreth of a mm across, i.e., ten times smaller than one of these genes stretched out to its full length. […]
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Energetic materials is a rather innocuous sounding expression for far-from-innocuous materials, they are explosives (I think at least some fuels are also classified as energetic materials). The idea being that energetic materials are materials that can yield large amounts of energy, and explosives can certainly do that, and very rapidly too. Many energetic materials are […]
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This week was the 2013 IgNobel prize ceremony, the IgNobel prizes are the Nobel prizes’ amusing little brother. The Physics IgNobel was won by a bunch of Italian physicists walking on water. Presumably due to their limited budget, they did this on Earth, but rigged up a harness to take 5/6ths of their weight, to […]
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I have been reading a fascinating paper on a couple of proteins called lamin-A and lamin-B. Our cells have their DNA in a particular compartment called the nucleus and the lamin’s basically strengthen the wall of the nucleus, protecting the DNA inside. The work is by Dennis Discher’s group at the University of Pennsylvania.
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This is a good question. It is also the excellent title of a rather speculative paper. The point is that cancer is a disease that results from us, and whales, being multicellular animals. We are made from around a few hundred trillion cells. If one of them starts dividing uncontrollably then it can produce more […]
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