Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is a molecule that provides blueprints for cells to make a protein that may be needed by the body. Though around for nearly 60 years before COVID-19 erupted from Wuhan, China, it didn't get a lot of attention from government-funding agencies, where the grant system most often means experiments likely to work rather than anything revolutionary,(1) That all changed...
read moreMicroplastics are a kernel of biological concern that gets magnified by hype, like endocrine "disrupting" chemicals or weedkillers detectable in breast milk. In modern times, we can detect anything in anything, so the 'zero' levels of the 1960s no longer exist, because testing is 1,000,000 times more sensitive than it was in the past.read...
read moreThanks to the fall armyworm, nearly all of Africa's maize crop is in jeopardy, finds a new study. The new projection was made using 3,175 geo-tagged occurrences and factoring in physiological and climatological requirements to geographically assess its range. They showed that almost 92 percent of Africa’s maize growing areas can mean year-round growth of fall armyworm while 95 percent are...
read moreA new process uses harmless viruses that eat bacteria to form microscopic beads that can safely be applied to food and other materials to rid them of harmful pathogens such as E. coli. Though tiny, each bead is about one third the width of human hair, they have millions of bacteriophages. read...
read moreNewly-discovered historical information adds weight to the belief that given what was known in the mid-19th century, Gregor Mendel, the Austrian (Moravian, now part of the Czech Republic) Monk was even further ahead of his time. So advanced his work was criticized by some as 'too good to be true' despite surviving every challenge.Resentful scientists may have later tried to claim he...
read moreGenetic admixture didn't begin in the 1970s, when insulin became the first government approved genetically modified organism (GMO) and AquAdvantage salmon, where an Atlantic salmon expresses a natural gene from a Chinook salmon to grow faster, certainly was not the first time such genetic engineering showed benefits across the ecosystem.A new study finds that genetic admixture occurred in polar...
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