The gist of Professor Greg Benford's talk at the Patrick Henry Democratic Club in the OC this May of '06 was virtually orthogonal to what he said at the Orange County Science Fiction Club's meeting about a year ago. At that meeting, he gave us the full-scope analysis/overview of the problem, with the Power Point slides, etc., and it didn't sound hopeful at all, with NONE of the proposed solutions really making a dent in the final apocalyptic outcome for the planet, taken separately or all to...

Some time in that past few years, I got to hear Dr. Douglas C. Wallace, the Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences and Molecular Medicine at UCI discuss his research on mitochondria, the energy organelles that power all our cells. Wallace is the generally acknowledged top-gun worldwide in mitochondrial research. I posed him a hypothesis, during Q & A, which I had come up with on my own to explain an interesting anomoly. Background: We all have various different variants of mitoch...

So, a woman inherits some nasty genetic defect that blocks production of some key protein. What happens? Typically little or nothing, because that defect is only expressed in 50% of her cells. Most of the time, the same is true for us men. However, if the defect is on the X chromosome, of which (most) women have two copies, but (most) men only have one, then the men who inherit it will typically die, if they even make it to term, while the women will live And (most) women do not have ...

Ok... You heard it here first. I suspect. Update: April 22, 2004 UCI (University of California, Irvine) had a Dr. Thompson this Tuesday speaking on her specialty, Huntington's Disease, and the genomics thereof. If you ever get a chance to hear this lady, do it. She is not only very smart and very good at communicating, but she is also a FOX! Definitely some genes worth preserving there, which is my only motivation, of course.... Anyway, turns out that there are about 10% of...