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 “It is possible to travel back in time” is a bold way to begin a scientific paper by any standard. This promising first sentence appeared in a the respectable journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, earlier this year. The words that follow reveal why: “at the molecular level by reconstructing proteins from extinct organisms.” When [...]  A Lego brick on its own is nothing special. But link some of them together, and you could end up with anything from a medieval castle, to a pirate hideout or a space ship. Since 1947, the Lego company has released thousands of sets under the banner of a variety of different themes. Every one [...]  Different cultures around the world have sought to explain the multitude of human languages. In the Bible you can find the story of the Tower of Babel, set in a time when all of humanity spoke one language. The unity that this common language instilled allowed these people to do great things. But when they [...]  The genealogies of European royalty are genuinely terrifying in their complexity. No matter which history book you open, someone is always marrying some cousin of the third degree. To give you an idea: there are at least 4,010 different lines of descent from William the Conqueror to Prince William. Go figure. Protein families might rival [...]  When it comes to ancient times, biologists are pretty sloppy timekeepers. They measure time with something that they call the ‘molecular clock‘. Since every gene will undergo small mutations over time, they simply look at the number of differences between two genes of two different species to estimate how long ago they shared a common [...]  The saying “To know your future, you must know your past” is of special value to biologists. There’s no better way to understand an organism, than by it’s ancestry. It’s the only way creatures make any sense really! From appendices to tail bones, a species evolutionary past can sheds light on otherwise unexplainable features. But [...] |
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