Deleterious genes for a number of life-threatening diseases which palpably affect human fitness appear to persist in the gene pool at perplexingly high frequencies when you would think they would be eradicated over time by purifying natural selection. Now a group of...
Something a little light-hearted for a change. Hui Liu, Linda J. Waite, Shannon Shen and Donna H. Wang have just published a report on the effect of regular and enjoyable sex in later life, in the Journal of Health and Social Behaviour. It appears that, for men,...
Nearly 10% of the genome of all mammals is made up of viruses that infected mammalian ancestors eons ago. These retroviruses inserted their DNA into mammalian chromosomes and, while time has reduced many of them to useless genetic rubble, some of them, or fragments...
There is a sobering paper in the journal of the American Society for Microbiology, mBio, this week, written by Marc Sze and Patrick Schloss from the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Michigan. As they report, obesity is a growing health...
The idea that gut microbes can communicate with the brain to change behavior and, correspondingly, that signals from the brain can influence microbial gut populations has been around for a while and most of us in evmed land are pretty convinced by these links. Joe...
