Biophilia

Society is built up around institutions, which come in several varieties.

Some cilia are for motion, others are for sensing.

A biologist and former employee of IBM visits the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California.

Do cells take joy in tidying?

Different ways of learning go through different parts of the brain.

Two whole genome duplications lie at the root of vertebrate evolution.

Tracing the breadcrumbs of deep phylogeny through gene duplications.

The immunologically critical MHC gene cluster plays by its own rules through the arms race of life.

Notes on the genetics, traits, and evolution.

Billions of years have created some weird tricks in DNA search.

Review of "The Second Estate", by Ray Madoff, about how the rich have excused themselves from paying taxes.

Better modeling, by including the biosphere, retrodicts more of Earth's dynamic climate history.

Not enough appeasement, or not enough deterrence?

A new paper shows that CART therapies can be unleashed against solid tumors.

Labor's share of the economy has rarely been lower- what is going on?

Coccolithophores are beautiful, inside and out.

Review of Ray Dalio's "How Countries Go Broke".

Telling the difference between inner and outer speech.

Are we at peak oil, perhaps even peak burning?

The CCR5delta32 confers resistance to HIV.

Can politics work without a civic sphere?

An ornate ion pump manages rapid outflow of calcium.

Reflections on junk DNA, and junk transcripts.

The SLAMF9 gene became non-functional in the human lineage, and then later was re-activated.

Review of "Understanding Capitalism", by Richard Wolff.