Dork Scratchings

COBE CMB fluctuations. Original Source: NASA All tortoiseshell cats are female.  Males can be black, or ginger, but never tortoiseshell.  The reason for this is that the mechanism by which tortoiseshell cats get the patterns on their coats depends on having two X chromosomes.  This is all described beautifully in Chapter 7 of "Junk DNA", by Nessa Carey . Females have twice as many X chromosomes as males, which on the face of it should result in 100% more expression for the genes on that chromosome.  This should lead to much greater differences between males and females than we actually see.  To put this in perspective, Down's syndrome is caused by individuals having 3 copies of chromosome 21 instead of 2.  But this is a far smaller chromosome than X and the difference is only 50%, rather than 100%.  (The fact that chromosome 21 is so small is the reason Down's syndrome is more common than syndromes in which there are too many copies of more impo...

  Original Image: Mariuswalter CC BY-SA 4.0 I've just finished reading "A Crack In Creation" by Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg.  Doudna is the co-creator of CRISPR, the gene editing tool that genuinely is a Cracking Creation.  (I don't think the pun was intended since the word Cracking is not used much outside of and Wallace and Grommit appreciation societies, however, it would have been incredibly apt if it were!) If you are interested in How-Things-Work then this is a book for you.  I knew next to nothing about cell biology before starting it and now I feel like a pro.  The authors' writing style is incredibly clear, but what really saves you from the sense of drowning in acronym soup are the excellent illustrations throughout the book.  So, if you have heard the terms: DNA, RNA, base pair, ribosome, amino acid, protein, phage, virus, prokaryote, ... and so on, but aren't really sure what these things are or how they relate to each other th...