Satellite photos such as the one above depict our precious planetary home as a roughly spherical object colored with some mix of white, blue, green and brown pigments. I’m fairly confident that pretty much all of us know that the white color comes from snow, the blue color comes from bodies of water on our planet, the brown color comes from dirt in various forms, and the prominent green color comes from plants.
Continue reading Why are plants green?
Month: June 2017
Sports and society
A large number of us grew up playing some sort of sport in our youth and many of us still follow our favorite teams, living vicariously through them till present day. Thinking objectively, one may assume that society would view activities which involve a bunch of grown men chasing a ball around for over an hour while trash talking the hell out of each as a rather pointless exercise. In actuality though, a large swath of us continue to open our physical and digital wallets to watch sporting spectacles of all kinds either through the “idiot box” or in person. The next natural question to ask then, is why do we engage in this seeming act of folly? Well, my answer to that rhetorical question is that our affinity for sporting spectacles cannot really be understood from a logical point of view because the pull of sporting spectacles as a whole is much more emotional than logical. Continue reading Sports and society
An Introduction to genetic mutations in plain english
Thanks in large part to Stan Lee and the Marvel comic universe that he created, hearing the word mutant immediately brings heroic fictional characters such as Storm, Jean Grey, or the perpetually angry but loveable Wolverine to many of our minds. While the underlying story of the X-Men in the Marvel universe has a grain of truth to it, it is important to note that the word “mutant” isn’t synonymous with “super power”. In actual fact, when we call a living organism a “mutant”, it means that it has somehow acquired a slight variation in its DNA relative to the norm. At this point, you might want to read this article if you’re new to all this DNA stuff and would like to get a basic understanding of it before you continue. Continue reading An Introduction to genetic mutations in plain english
