“From the pages of Your Inner Fish, it is clear that if a supreme being were responsible for creating life on Earth, from bacteria to humans, He or She displayed little intelligence. Far from being the perfectly crafted handiwork of a deity, our bodies are jerry-rigged patchworks of old bones, cells and genes bolted on to old frameworks that creak and groan at every opportunity. Men suffer hernias because their spermatic cords, inherited from ancient fish ancestors, leave them susceptible to gut tissue spilling through muscle walls, for example, while the evolution of the voice box has left us vulnerable to all sorts of breathing and swallowing ailments.

“Or consider hiccups. Spasms in our diaphragms, hiccups are triggered by electric signals generated in the brain stem. Amphibian brain stems emit similar signals, which control the regular motion of their gills. Our brain stems, inherited from amphibian ancestors, still spurt out odd signals producing hiccups that are, according to Shubin, essentially the same phenomenon as gill breathing.”

via Review: Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin | Books | The Observer.

“What goes on in human beings when they make or listen to music?”

via Goodreads

“Like all of Roach’s books, Gulp is as much about human beings as it is about human bodies.”

via Goodreads

A number of researchers are now convinced mothers seed their fetuses with microbes during pregnancy. They argue that this early inoculation may be important to the long-term health of babies. And manipulating these fetal microbes could open up new ways to treat medical conditions ranging from pre-term labor to allergies.

Many suspect that immune cells in the mother’s intestines swallow up bacteria there and ferry them into the bloodstream, where they eventually wind up in the uterus.

via Human Microbiome May Be Seeded Before Birth – NYTimes.com.

“The problems we are trying to solve require so many calculations, we ask people to donate their unused computer power to crunch some of the numbers.”

Help Stanford University scientists studying Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and many cancers by simply running a piece of software on your computer. Add your computer to over 274,000 others around the world to form the world’s largest distributed supercomputer.

via Folding@home.

Memory Protein Fades With Age | Science/AAAS | News.