The NERS poll of the year continues. Same rules as before: you vote for your favourite stories from this blog over the last year, in various fields of science.
We've had animal behaviour, palaeontology and medicine. Today, genetics. Click on the links to refresh your memory and make your pick below.
- What is the difference between the human genome and a pair of headphones?
- DNA sculpture and origami - a meeting of art and nanotechnology
- How inbreeding killed off a line of kings
- Genetic neoteny - how delayed genes separate human brains from chimps
- The death and resurrection of IRGM - the "Jesus gene"
- The copied gene that gave dachshunds and corgis their short legs
- Unintentional genetic engineering - grafted plants trade genes
- Child abuse permanently modifies stress genes in brains of suicide victims
More like this
John Hawks has an interesting post on what it means to be human in which he argues that our "human-ness" (humanity?) is our shared evolutionary history. I like it. But Hawks also writes the following:
Targeted discovery of novel human exons by comparative genomics:
There was a time not that long ago when sequencing a single gene would be hailed as a scientific milestone.