George Wilkinson is an assistant professor of Pediatrics at a college in the Midwest. His blogging interests include development, neuroscience, genomics, and evolution. Email: [email protected]
by George Wilkinson Animals have the remarkable capability of self-maintenance, including healing of and functional recovery from damage. In contrast, inorganic materials are degrade over time and must be repaired or replaced to maintain function. Self-healing materials are a class of smart materials, inspired by biological systems, which have the ability to repair damage autonomously.…
by George Wilkinson The points of leaves and twigs on which the spider begins her work are few, and she fills the air with a beautiful ciruiting. Man should be content with as few points to tip with the fine Web of his Soul, and weave a tapestry empyrean full of symbols for his spiritual…
The classically understood flow of information in present day organisms flows from DNA to RNA to protein. However, RNA can both store heritable information and carry out biochemical activities, and is thus capable of the functions principally served by DNA and protein. The RNA world hypothesis proposes that life based on RNA predated the current…
by George Wilkinson The Motion Aftereffect illusion, or Waterfall illusion, occurs when prolonged viewing of motion in one direction makes a subsequently viewed stationary item appear to move in the opposite direction. An example is seen in this short video. The viewer fixates on a stationary blue point near a pattern moving toward the top…
by George Wilkinson Every year, the Earth captures thousands of tons of interplanetary particles, with objects in the micron size range striking every thirty microseconds. Because of their small size, some of them waft to the surface with minimal heat damage—thus their interiors preserved traces of their interplanetary origins. Although micrometeories fall in over the…
by George Wilkinson In the broadest sense, sleep is defined as a period of inactivity and loss of awareness. Most humans sleep 7–8 h per night, and if we are deprived of sleep, our cognitive performance, metabolism and health suffer. Sleep clearly contributes to several important physiological functions. Hypotheses for sleep benefits include overall rest…
“You can see a lot just by looking.” –Yogi Berra by George Wilkinson The formation of a large body fossil is a complicated process involving rapid burial of the remains and chemical and physical interaction of the body with the forming rock bed. The final, discovered, fossil contains an amalgamation of chemical signatures of the…
by George Wilkinson Cells across the tree of life are built with very similar components: A wall to keep everything in, DNA which stores the genome, and RNA and protein which take care of the mechanics and metabolism. These components are heavily interdependent, and it is an ongoing puzzle how the modern cell emerged from…
The proper basis for a marriage is mutual misunderstanding. —Oscar Wilde People necessarily make use of assumptions in speaking to one another, choosing their words to convey necessary information succinctly and effectively. The assumption process creates a theory of mind regarding the audience, including their culture, motivations, previous experiences, etc. While communicating with a stranger…
Our visual system to seamlessly informs us about and guide us through the outside world so that we typically hardly notice its actions. However, our brain has limited processing capacity, and must filter visual input to extract the more biologically meaningful features from the totality of the visual scene. Optical illusions, in which a perception…