What Have We Here?Behold, a screenshot of a tiny, tiny part of...

What Have We Here? Behold, a screenshot of a tiny, tiny part of the nominations list for Open Lab 2013. If you look closely, you may notice one particular blog name (or perhaps several, if you’re...

Skepticism and ScienceAs many of you who read science news will...

Skepticism and Science As many of you who read science news will know, the ENCODE data set is currently lighting up the world of molecular biology. For the first notable time since the Human Genome...

Magnifying Human DiseaseAs our ability to peer into the very,...

Magnifying Human Disease As our ability to peer into the very, very small increases, we’ve had the opportunity to see the normally invisible pathogens that have plagued humankind for centuries....

A scanning electron micrograph image of methicillin-resis-tant...

A scanning electron micrograph image of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) ingestion by a neutrophil. Bacteria pictured in yellow; neutrophil in purple. Image Credit: National...

Harnessing VirusesViruses are skillful mutants, changing their...

Harnessing Viruses Viruses are skillful mutants, changing their structures or outer proteins to evade the shifting natural defences of their targets. That’s why you have to get a flu shot every...

“I’m Talkin’ Bout The Super Bad Lab Grad,...

“I’m Talkin’ Bout The Super Bad Lab Grad, Yeah!” A humorous take on the life of a Ph.D. student in a biotechnology lab. As a university student on a lab course, some of the situations are already...

Coloured scanning electron micrograph (SEM) image of influenza A...

Coloured scanning electron micrograph (SEM) image of influenza A virus particles. The most virulent of the three influenza types, the Influenza A virus particle consists of a core of RNA surrounded...

Facing The FutureInduced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs, are...

Facing The Future Induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs, are futuristic, astounding, and could someday save your life. iPSCs are artificially derived from non-pluripotent cells - usually normal...

Evolution By Natural Selection: Building My Own Genetic...

Evolution By Natural Selection: Building My Own Genetic Algorithm I was posed a variety of very interesting questions on my blog this morning, one of which referenced skepticism at the idea that...

There are also some scientists who are now questioning natural selection because of the complexities of some organisms and their functional anatomy. Some of the stuff I've read points out things that Darwin could never have assumed or understood, but we do now because of microscopy. These scientist are saying that the adaptions of some species could not have happened 'step by step' because the organisms wouldn't have survived in the intermediate state. Do you have any thoughts on those theories?

The easy answer is perhaps. First, which scientist(s)? Things like this are often easier to talk about in detail. Second, there are definitely things that Darwin missed - DNA hadn’t been discovered...

InvasionCancer invasion and metastasis transform a locally...

Invasion Cancer invasion and metastasis transform a locally growing tumour into a systematic and life-threatening disease. But how tumour cells (green in the image above) migrate between organs is...

So teaching creationism in school affects you and you think it's wrong but teaching evolution in school is just fine by you? Don't you think that's a double standard? It takes just as much faith to believe all of this happened MILLIONS of years ago after a BANG as it does for me to believe that there's a God that created it all. Don't you agree? Both beliefs require faith in something we can't see or prove 100%. No?

I’m not really talking about the origin of the universe, or even the origin of life, when I’m discussing evolution - it’s an entirely different topic and one that science doesn’t really have any...

Do you believe in God?

I personally do not, but I have many intelligent friends who do and I respect them just as much for it. If people want to believe what they wish in privacy, that’s fine with me. If they start...

704TB in DNA: A New Method of Information Storage?One of the...

704TB in DNA: A New Method of Information Storage? One of the first things you learn in biology is that the nucleic acids, particularly DNA, store the biological blueprint inside an organism’s...

Pattern PenchantMuch like their in-vitro cousins that form...

Pattern Penchant Much like their in-vitro cousins that form swirling fractals in petri dishes, bacteria growing within biofilms organise themselves into reproducible patterns and shapes that can be...

Played By Humans, Scored By NatureMeet eteRNA, your new...

Played By Humans, Scored By Nature Meet eteRNA, your new internet addiction. Not only is it a super-fun way to procrastinate on that thing you should be doing, it also helps to advance biology’s...

Meet The NeurosphereA neurosphere is a system composed of...

Meet The NeurosphereA neurosphere is a system composed of free-floating clusters of neural stem cells. Because stem cells cannot be studied in vivo, neurospheres provide a method of investigating...

Rogue Response: Chemotherapy Undermines ItselfA new study,...

Rogue Response: Chemotherapy Undermines ItselfA new study, published in Nature Medicine, has suggested that chemotherapy used to treat metastatic cancers can cause a rogue response in healthy...

Evolving ClocksThe 21st century’s version of creationism,...

Evolving ClocksThe 21st century’s version of creationism, intelligent design, can be summed up by the Blind Watchmaker argument - that like a watch, whose intricacy implies a watchmaker, life...

Rat Brain Tissue SectionsThe rat brain has served as an...

Amygdala Blood Vessels Cerebellum Cerebral Cortex Dentate Gyrus Hippocampus Hypothalamus Lateral Ventricle Longitudinal Fissure Medulla Oblongata Rat Brain Tissue SectionsThe rat brain has served...

Retinal FireworksRetinal ganglion cells transmit signals from...

Retinal FireworksRetinal ganglion cells transmit signals from the rods and cones in the eye to the brain. The retinal ganglion cells shown here have the extraordinary property that their dendrites...

A Tour of a Human HepatocyteThese extraordinary TEM microscopy...

A Tour of a Human HepatocyteThese extraordinary TEM microscopy shots by Dennis Kunkel are images of functioning organelles of a hepatocyte, or liver cell. The first image is the whole cell - the...

Model for the DNA binding and cleavage fragment of yeast...

Model for the DNA binding and cleavage fragment of yeast topoisomerase II (blue/red spheres) bound to a separated DNA strand (green spheres). One protomer is shaded darker than the other to...

Maths Moment of the Day: A Hearty Defence of AlgebraAn article,...

Maths Moment of the Day: A Hearty Defence of AlgebraAn article, interesting at best, called “Is Algebra Necessary?”, was recently featured on the opinion pages of the New York Times. I read it...

Connect the Dots?This computer model shows the connectivity of...

Connect the Dots?This computer model shows the connectivity of the 10,000 neurons and 30 million connections that make up a single neocortical column (the basic building block of the cortex). The...

Coloured x-ray image of a healthy human stomach.Image Credit:...

Coloured x-ray image of a healthy human stomach.Image Credit: Science Photo Library.

YOU'RE BLOG IS COOL VERY VISUALLY PLEASING BUT PLEASE MA'AM BIG BANG THEORY IS NOT GOOD

Bioporn might not be the best way to tag a bio blog... It's a bit ambiguous @_@

describe your blog in one word?

Bioporn. Or awesome. Take your pick.

Quick Thanks...

To all the lovely people who take the time to send me asks about how much they like this blog: If you sent the ask anonymously you probably never got a response, and I probably didn’t get around to...