genomeboy.com

‘Tis the season for a re-gifting pandemic:

Recently, Nancy’s 11-year-old daughter, Chun, aided and abetted by Nancy’s partner, Chrissie Schlesinger, presented Nancy with a birthday present that seemed oddly familiar. They had spotted a carving that Nancy had just been given by one of her students in their Lower Manhattan loft, and they added it to their own pile of gifts for her. This incident would seem to suggest the primacy of the behavioral model in re-gifting. Close investigation, however, points to the possibility of a strong genetic factor as well, probably on the maternal side.

The Frieds’ father, the late Dr. Paul Fried, was a prosperous Philadelphia physician. He and his wife, Grace, had a four-story town house and a country house, and employed a maid. Yet one day when driving back to the city with her three young daughters, Mrs. Fried spotted some boxes on the side of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

“She pulled over,” Nancy remembers, “and we’re tearing these boxes open. They were filled with stockings. We took them back to the house and spent days sorting thousands of stockings in every shade. What was funny is my mother grew up in a wealthy home, it wasn’t like she was somebody who was deprived, and the fact is we all could have been killed.”

Yeah, baby:

Operation Immortality is a project intended to collect and archive the very best of what humanity has accomplished by sending a digital time capsule of the human race, including messages from people around the world and DNA samples from some of our brightest minds, musicians, athletes and video game players.

Wait a second, dudes…aren’t you forgetting someone?

See? All I have to do is wave my magic wand and the world conforms to my wishes. Scary!

Ach, if only that were true…

Pentailed tree shrews have such an appetite for alcohol that each night they imbibe, weight for weight, the equivalent of a human downing up to nine glasses of wine.

***

“Alcohol intake by the pentailed tree shrew reaches levels that are dangerous to other mammals. This finding suggests adaptive benefits inherent to a diet high in alcohol.”

The German-led research team said it was likely the shrews avoided drunkenness and hangovers because their bodies had enhanced biological mechanisms to break down and dispose of alcohol, though what they are has yet to be pinpointed.

BALTIMORE—On Monday, scientists at Johns Hopkins University isolated the gene which causes homosexuality in human males, promptly segregating it from normal, heterosexual genes. “I had suspected that gene was queer for a long time now. There was just something not quite right about it,” said team leader Dr. Norbert Reynolds…Among the factors Reynolds cited as evidence of the gene’s gayness: its pinkish hue; meticulously frilly perimeter; and faint but distinct, perfume-like odor.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Genetic Scientists Develop Sheep With Brain Of A Goat

Comic lives here. Hat tip.

…I say Onion.

This is pretty funny:

I went to attend a screening of the creationist propaganda movie, Expelled, a few minutes ago. Well, I tried … but I was Expelled!