Before the 18th century, scientists and non-scientists alike assumed that the material substance of living organisms was fundamentally different from that of non-living things -- organisms and their products were considered organic by definition, while non-living things were mineral or inorganic. 

With the invention of chemistry in the late 18th century, scientists uncovered the incoherence of the traditional distinction: all material substances are constructed from the same set of chemical elements.  Today we understand that the special properties of living organic matter emerge from the interactions of a large variety of large molecules built mostly with atoms of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen.

Anonymity is the simultaneous source of the internet's greatest strength and weakness. What do I mean by anonymity? Well in real life (RL), my identity is more or less set in stone by our current legal system. True I can change my name, but it doesn't really mean alot, when there is a legal record of it. People can still find out who I am. Not to mention the fact that the I can't really change the skin I'm in either, as in the details of my physical body. It's not as easy to fake DNA tests, fingerprinting, and retinal scans as it is to fake an email address.

It's a modern medicinal miracle. Health food advocates haven't been this excited since Psyllium took the nation by storm. Cocoa is for real and it apparently does everything.

A short while ago, it was said to make us smarter. and before then it could improve blood flow and maybe deter cancer.

Your football coach always told you that the low man wins. Seems that ape-like ancestors may have evolved that way for the same reason.

Australopiths maintained short legs for 2 million years because a squat physique and stance helped the males fight over access to females, a University of Utah study concludes.

"The old argument was that they retained short legs to help them climb trees that still were an important part of their habitat," says David Carrier, a professor of biology. "My argument is that they retained short legs because short legs helped them fight."

Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) hold great promise for benefiting degenerative diseases, and do so by invoking multiple mechanisms. Such cells can be grown in a manner compatible with clinical use (i.e., without animal feeder layers) and even without the need for immunosuppression. These were a few of a number of conclusions arrived at by an international collaboration led by Evan Y. Snyder, M.D., Ph.D., and spearheaded by a member of his lab, Jean-Pyo Lee, Ph.D., of the Burnham Institute for Medical Research ("Burnham"). The study, to be published in Nature Medicine, will be made available by advanced publication at the journal's website on March 11, 2007.

The "raging hormones" of puberty are known to produce mood swings and stress for most teenagers, making it difficult to cope with this period of life. Until now, the specific causes of pubertal anxiety have not been identified, making it harder to understand and treat adolescent angst.

In the current edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience, researchers led by Sheryl S. Smith, PhD, professor of physiology and pharmacology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, report findings demonstrating that a hormone normally released in response to stress, THP, actually reverses its effect at puberty, when it increases anxiety.

This hormone normally acts like a tranquilizer, acting at sites in the brain that "calm" brain activity.

Each year, malaria results in more than a million deaths. Controlling this disease involves understanding its transmission, and understanding its transmission means understanding its basic reproductive number, R0. For all infectious disease, R0 describes the most important aspects of transmission as it is the expected number of hosts that can trace their infection directly back to a single host after one disease generation. For vector-borne diseases, such as malaria, R0 is given by a classic formula. In a new study published in PLoS Biology, David Smith and colleagues demonstrate that estimates of R0 range from around one to over 3,000, providing much higher estimates than previously thought, with serious implications for the control of the disease.

Do you want to participate in an online effort to create free science textbooks that could be downloaded by any school in the world that lacks proper textbook resources? The Physics Department of the University of Cape Town, South Africa is currently supporting this effort and is looking for authors who can dedicate some of their spare time and knowledge. The URL is www.fhsst.org. Click read more, if you'd like to know more about my relation to this effort.

 Soprano syndrome in the mousehouse?

One of the first things my mice did when introduced to their new Chinese-made home (details on that to come later) was to seek out their new boundaries. Then, almost as a herd, they sought out the little clear red mouse house in the center of the cage. Boundary, then home. I note this same basic instinct in the ethology of the three categories of mammals I observe the most: my nephews, my horse, and, now, my four black6 lab mice.