Short Lecture on Epigenetics

I listened to this lecture on epigenetics the other day when I was cleaning my room. Although the language is a little technical in spots, it's pretty interesting to a lay observer.

Enjoy!

Squirrels Might Be Good for Something!

My friends were standing outside the classics building, the other day, discussing the stupidity of squirrels. It's true, I have encountered some fairly idiotic and foolhardy squirrels in my time, but a new article has generated some faith in the little fuzzy beasts. According to the New York Times, Russian scientists claim to have re-germinated and recreated a plant from fruit buried by a squirrel almost 32,000 years ago. I can't wait to see whether the arctic flower will hold up to outside inspection.

Mammalian Evolution

A New York Times article, yesterday, reports that an anthropoid ancestor of the primate, may have originated in Asia rather than Africa. Anthropoids, as I found out, were creatures between the about twice the weight of chinchilla but smaller than a marmot. Although they were the size of a large rodent, they looked very much like primates.

Picture from NYT article: Lybia, where the fossils were found

Raw Foodism and Evolution

I stumbled upon this NPR piece a little while ago and, being both a cooking and evolutionary biology enthusiast, found it fascinating. Apparently cooking helped make humans smarter (by allowing for larger, more complex brains) because cooked food can be digested more easily and allows a faster extraction of nutrients from the food source.


The piece, which is very well done except for some annoying chewing noises at the beginning, starts at about 5:45 after a short note on companies hiring marine scientists to keep their mouths shut about the oil spill.

When I stumbled across the piece, I immediately sent it to Cynthia, who had tried raw-foodism for a while. She noted that, like the piece described, she felt clean and healthy at first, but began to notice decreasing energy. This is apparently because the human body likes the roughage from a raw food diet, but it requires so much energy to process the calories that ultimately one stops getting enough nutrients and vitamins.