Carbohydrates comprise only about 1 percent of the human body; proteins comprise 15 percent, fatty substances 15 percent and inorganic substances 5 percent (the rest being water). Nevertheless, carbohydrates are important constituents of the human diet, accounting for a high percentage of the calories consumed. Thus some 40 percent of the calorie intake of Americans […]

A n insignificant percentage of the total amount of DNA is devoted actual gene function. The most common protein recipe in the human genome is not even for a human protein, but rather an enzyme commonly used by viruses to copy them called reverse transcriptase, an essential part of the toolbox used by the AIDS […]

It was known early in the century that ABO blood group substances occur in human tissues and secretions in two forms, water-soluble and alcohol-soluble, and that persons with these substances in saliva (secretors) have more water-soluble substances in their tissues than those lacking the substance in their saliva (non-secretors). One of the primary differences in […]

The last century has seen science and technology used to justify any and all supremacist theories, culminating in the development of a pseudoscience called “Eugenics”, which advocated the improvement of society through what might me called selective breeding. Now, not all of the eugenic goals were crackpot and indeed many prominent scientists (including one of […]

After a self-declared coding holiday, I was back at things this weekend working on the Pathscrubber module of the Datapunk platform. A recently developed vexing problem that needed to be addressed was actually two problems intertwined. If you used Pathscrubber and clicked on any gene/protein node, PS would query Entrez-gene for the descriptive text and […]