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Watch Where You Step: A Geophile’s Manifesto
Whether it’s for the Big C or the Fire Trails, the Berkeley Hills find their way onto every Berkeley student’s list of token destinations. However, when we commit ourselves to trekking those ridiculous slopes, we often only look to the sky to catch the west coast sunsets, the stars on a clear night, the sprawling…
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Do We Become Less Human as We Age?
var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push([‘_setAccount’, ‘UA-47846382-1’]); _gaq.push([‘_trackPageview’]); (function() { var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true; ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’; var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); What makes us a human? Walking on two legs? Language? Empathy? Our large prefrontal cortex, which…
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The Scientific Human: Homo sapiens sapiens ignorando
Richard Feynman, one of the most brilliant and influential scientists of the 20th century, asked in his book The Meaning of It All, Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist: “Is science of any value?” This is not a question to be taken lightly. One might recall that Richard Feynman, 1965 Nobel laureate in Physics, contributed to the…
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Artificial sweeteners: A victory against obesity or just the beginning of new problems?
With Halloween behind us and the beginning of the holiday season ahead, many folks are beginning a preemptive diet to ward off seasonal bellies. But with diet sodas and sugar-free desserts, are you really going to keep off those holiday pounds? Or could there be even more sinister consequences of turning to sugar-free products to avoid weight gain?…
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RNA-Based Therapies Meet the 21st Century
This post is cross-posted with The PLoS Student Blog We have all taken aspirin for minor aches, known someone who takes simvastatin to control elevated cholesterol, or are related to someone with hypertension who is prescribed ACE inhibitors for treatment. Most medications and over-the-counter drugs like these target enzymes (specialized proteins) that are directly involved in…