Gym rats: no matter how hard you work out, the world’s most dangerous exercise is long extinct. Having sex with Neanderthals and Denisovans made your ancestors stronger, so long as it didn’t kill them.
Tag: DNA
We call pandas#@t on those numbers
It’s been 10 years, and you all know what that means: it’s time for another panda census in China. Just like here in the U.S., certain elements are afraid to comply with the once-a-decade count, even if an undercount could mean a drop in state support for panda services.
So, what is the Chinese government to do? Does a bear crap in the woods? Unfortunately for paranoid pandas, yes, they do. And China’s gonna count your turds.
In Other News: Anti-census crusader Michelle Bachmann wants you to know that she is not a flake, just a serial killer.
How humans got head
The human genome has been mapped, but that doesn’t mean that science is done poking around with our source code. Much like bebop and other free-form jazz, sometimes you have to find the genes that aren’t present to learn what separates us from our animal foes.
And that is how David Kingsley of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Stanford University School of Medicine in California and colleagues found the gene that makes beejers possible.
Also, something or other about our brains.
(P.S.: As you can tell by the category list, this story was really in our wheelhouse.)
Sharing VD means caring
While we’re on the topic of Valentine’s Day, there’s another V.D. you need to be aware of today, and that’s venereal disease.
The disease du jour is gonorrhea. In the spirit of finding one’s soulmate, gonorrhea only infects humans and has done so since Biblical times and probably earlier. Why such a deep connection? It could be gonorrhea’s shared human DNA fragment, which scientists recently discovered in its genome.
That’s right:
Science: Women holding up the evolution train
Are you glad you don’t have a tail to sit on right now? Thank your male ancestors. That’s right, the dudes–the original ones.
Science has found, startlingly, that the Y chromosome that makes guys guys may in fact evolve faster than the X chromosome, which is what makes guys cry for sports-related tragedies. The Y chromosome is actually continually renewing itself. This means that guys are evolving faster.
In fact, you know how humans and chimpanzees have less than one percent difference in DNA? (We don’t like it any more than you do.) Well our Y chromosomes are 30 percent different from theirs. So guys are more different from chimps than women.
Men: Proudly working to grow wings for mankind since about six million years ago.
It’s worse than we thought
I hope you’re sitting down. I’ve got some very bad news.
No, I’m talking about a man attempting to create government funded dinosaurs by fusing chickens with ancient DNA and thus destroy us all. Nor am I talking about how science has managed to create the scariest looking monkeys of all time.
Yet still am I not talking about how the Department of Veterans Affairs managed to “accidentally” diagnose over eighteen hundred veterans with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Whoopsidoodle!
What I am talking about is the potential latest victim of the economic crisis: beer.
It appears that due to low sales volumes across the world, brewers are going to be raising prices. Anheuser-Busch InBev has already announced that they’ll be increasing the cost of alcohol pure sip come this fall. But it doesn’t with just the crappy beer produced by them. MillerCoors and Heineken will be raising their prices as well, though MillerCoors states that this is “part of the company’s regular fall increases.”
So, what does this mean for you, faithful reader? Not a lot of good. Despite the hurricane/tornado/storm speculator mentality that this will sound like, I can wholeheartedly recommend rushing out and buying up beer at the price it is now, if it hasn’t been raised. I’m already hurt by the decisions. It’s hard enough for me to find Sam Adam’s Summer Ale (my personal favorite) as it is right now, since the season is essentially over for it-but to pay more for it? Talk about paying painfully for pleasure.
Time to make spears, everyone
We warned you about it over a year ago. It was announced yesterday that scientists have mapped the DNA of the woolly mammoth, better known as That Hairy Elephant We Killed Off a While Back.
This “groundbreaking” achievement was done under the guise of helping science learn what makes some species die off and some survive. Hey scientists, news flash, WE cause the extinction of animals, and we only save the ones that are cute and/or can’t be turned into clothing.
This blog knows better than to believe science–about anything. The real reason they wanted to map the DNA of the woolly mammoth is so that they can bring it back and set a herd of them up on an island in a theme park. (Say, someone should write a book about this.)
We don’t need any more animals to fight, especially ones we already defeated. Did the Romans clone Hannibal so they could sack Carthage again? NO!
Anastasia is dead …
… as of 90 years ago.
Scientists in Russia, Austria and the U.S. have finished examing the remains of the Tsar Nicholas II’s two missing children. Using DNA, medical records and forensics, they have been positively identified as dead, not living and definitely not your grandmother.
Turns out the old broad was just crazy/hated your great-grandparents. The real little princess was executed, just like those commies claimed, in 1918.
So, now that you’re not the heir to the Russian throne anymore, get back to work!
‘I’ll just nip out the back and shoot myself’
On first reading this headline, “We have created human-animal embryos already, say British team,” our first instincts were to urge a tactical first-strike on Britannia. After all, a war on animals includes preempting any Isle of Dr. Moreau attrocities.
But we continued reading the article. (It’s only one day after April Fools, and the British press have made up news for centuries.)
These scientists may have opened the doors to The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by combining human and cow DNA. Think about it: vegetarians will be forced to leave us steak- and, to a lesser extent, hamburger-eaters alone if we only eat suicidal cows.
Our prescription for our new bovine sapiens? Lots and lots of The Cure.