Zen Faulkes’ very entertaining commentary on the biology embedded in the new SciFi movie, Prometheus is here (hat tip to Andrew Sullivan). I also agree with him generally. Although I’d add this: another “watermark” for relatedness would be at the phenotype level: it would be very interesting if alien brains had neurons that conducted action potentials based on ionic conductances.
Category: DNA
Health Hackers
From Saturday’s WSJ, this essay on health hacking: at its most glorified, rolling your own molecular biology. I first heard about this back in 2008 at Scifoo. It’s certainly taken off. The problem of course is that it’s not science without sufficient statistical power. Although, it certainly wouldn’t require any statistics to detect an unlucky SNP.
Discoverers and Discoveries 