Tag: science!

Oh Pepperdine, the Beautiful

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"'I started looking at buildings, she says. 'At one of my friend's dorms, the fire burnt the grass behind it. You can see the line of black, that scorching, all along the side of the building, but the building didn't burn. Nothing caught on fire.'" Why Pepperdine stays put when wildfires rage, by Alissa Walker, [...]

Gat-ta-ca! Gat-Ta-Ca!! GAT-TA-CA!!!

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"SOON TWO biotechnology firms will begin to offer couples undergoing in vitro fertilisation (IVF) the chance to screen embryos before they are implanted in the mother’s womb. This kind of preimplantation genetic diagnosis has, for nearly 30 years, been widely used to test for chromosomal abnormalities or specific genetic disorders that affect only a single [...]

Reasons to love California, #6

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Robotic squirrels: "That's where the robot squirrels come in. To find out, Sanjay Joshi, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at the University of California, Davis, built a squirrel with a heatable tail and a flagging mechanism, each controlled separately. That means biologists will be able to tell which signal the (rattle)snake is reacting to." Robosquirrel [...]

Science Kiddies

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How adorable: "A pair of high school sleuths sequenced the DNA from their dinners to determine that New York City sushi wasn't always what it claimed to be." DNA Sequences Expose Fishy Sushi, Findings Magazine, July 27, 2011

Liberals and Conservative have different brains

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"Opposing political views may be linked to differences in brain structures, a new study suggests. "Researchers at University College London found that liberals tend to have a larger anterior cingulate cortex, while conservatives have a larger amygdala. "Based on what's known about the roles of these two areas of the brain, the structural differences are [...]