Hoxful Monsters

Sarah palin somehow manages to make to the headlines for various reasons, on 24th October the Republican nominee for Vice President attacked scientific research done on fruit flies ,in a speech about her running mate John McCain’s policies on children with disabilities (you can read here)).Sarah Palin condemned “earmarks”, which are congressional mandates to spend money on specific projects.
“You’ve heard about some of these pet projects, they really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do …

Check this video from Helicos BioSciences showing their latest technology for DNA sequencing which promises to be a much cheaper than the conventional system.Many companies are trying to out do each other in terms of cost for sequencing.Applied Biosystems and relative new company Complete genomics might face a tough challenge from Helicos Bio sciences when it comes to Cheap DNA sequencing.

Just seven days remain now for the elections and the promises made by both John McCain and Obama before the economic drop of double funding to basic research looked a distant possibility till today. But speaking at the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing conference in Palo Alto, California, Obama science adviser and Stanford University plant biologist Sharon Long said she would advise that basic funding should survive the budget tightening of either candidate.Science adviser to Obama believes that science funding will not be compromised and will be …

Gene silencing through RNA interference (RNAi) pathway is a well known phenomenon ,where in long double stranded is processed into small interfering RNAs and which in turn silence the genes in sequence specific manner. These micro RNAs are pretty much conserved throughout the Bilaterians, such as Humans,flies and worms,which play pivotal role in substantial fraction of transcription.MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are ~21-24 nucleotide RNAs ,derived from distinctive hairpin precursors ,bind with mRNA and brings post transcriptional repression.In performing this function micro RNAs use the basal pathway of Dicer endonucleases and Argonaute effector …

It was absolutely shocking to hear Sarah palin’s views on Drosophila research going on in various parts of world.She is of the opinion that money should not be spent on small fruit flies ,which are of no use to public life and rather divert that money in curing the disabilities of children.
For many parents of children with disabilities, the most valuable thing of all is information. Early identification of a cognitive or other disorder, especially autism, can make a life-changing difference. […] We’ve got a three trillion dollar budget, and …

The famous Miller-Urey experiment in 1953 which recreated hypothetical conditions thought at the time to be present on the early Earth, and tested for the occurrence of chemical evolution.Stanley Miller, then a 23-year-old graduate student with Harold Urey, conducted an experiment which happens to be a classical experiment towards understanding origin of life on our planet.The main reason behind performing this experiment was to test Alexander Oparin and J. B. S. Haldane’s hypothesis that conditions on the primitive Earth favoured chemical reactions that probably synthesized organic compounds from inorganic precursors.

Sexual cannibalism has fascinated biologists ever since the days of Charles Darwin.It’s a behaviour in which one member of a courting or copulating male-female pair consumes the other,seen among mantises and other invertebrates, including spiders, midges and perhaps horned nudibranchs.
“If you put a pair together and come back later, you’ll just find the wings of the male and no other evidence he was ever there,” — William Brown, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia.
Biologists came up with various explanation to explain this behaviour …