THE FIRST PERSON TO LIVE TO 1000 YEARS OLD MAY HAVE ALREADY BEEN BORN, says gerontologist Dr. Aubrey de Grey. According to de Grey, age itself is a disease. And the cure is close. “We are working to develop medicines that will bring ageing under true medical control,” says de Grey, former professor at Cambridge University … Continue reading
Category Archives: Biology
Neanderthals and Homo-Sapiens: A tale of prehistoric debauchery
Well, this is awkward. Some of our Homo Sapien ancestors had sex with Neanderthals. We know this because a curious bunch of palaeontologists at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany decided to spool through Neanderthal genomes in 2010. However, we never quite understood the implications of such filthy, prehistoric debauchery. That’s where John Capra … Continue reading
A single-celled organism with a small human-like ‘eye’
— Billy Wright SCIENTISTS STUDYING MICROSCOPIC LIFE IN SEAWATER have found, what we laypeople might call, a tiny floating eyeball. Just as with our own eyes, the creature is fitted with a lens, cornea and retina. But what’s remarkable is that it’s all inside the one cell. Scientists from the University of British Columbia (UBC) had … Continue reading
The prehistoric first words of man & womankind
Image: Reconstruction of Homo habilis, of a Hominini tribe. Westfälisches Museum für Archäologie, Herne. Wikimedia Commons. By Billy Wright ‘Beastly,’ was the first word of a child George Orwell; he was eighteen months old and bedridden with bronchitis. Russel Brand’s first words were ‘don’t do that’—appropriately repressive? Steven Spielberg asks back with his first, ‘why?’ Bambi the … Continue reading
Tickle me schizophrenic
“…[Our] brains may reduce the sensation of our own actions in order to increase the sensation of alien force” Continue reading