It's A Darwin - Win - Situation

This year we are celebrating the courage and genius of Charles Darwin. It's been 200 years since his birth and 150 since he explained his revolutionary idea of evolution and the origin of species. So here are some cool Darwinian sites with lots of good graphics and info.

The BBC have been making some excellent programs and have been generous with on-line content at their BBC Darwin Pages.

You can also find the BBC's lovely visualisation of evolution on planet earth at the Wellcome Trust Darwin site.

Science News have produced a good evolution timeline. It has a slide bar control and some neat graphics. You may have to scroll down a bit to find the controls...

Project Steve: although we have been evolving for about 3.5 billion years and Darwin explaind his ideas one and a helf centuries ago, it seems that some people still haven't quite got the gist yet... Project Steve is a sort of serious 'joke' about a very important issue.

This is the first model of DNA as visualised by Crick and Watson in 1953. Fifty years later, the Human Gnome Project had mapped out our DNA, building upon, and further confirming the ideas first put forward by Darwin.

Go on, evolve. You know you want to!

A lovely illustrated edition of The Origin Of Species

Darwin's four major works in one volume

The Autobiographiues of Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life BBC DVD with David Attenborough

It's Stem & Us

A new breakthrough in stem cell research means that the future is looking far brighter for some suffers of certain conditions and diseases such as Parkinson's and Multiple Sclerosis. There is good evidence that both these illnesses could be treatable with therapy using stem cells to replace the damaged or degenerating tissues. Unfortunately, research in this area of medical science has been hindered by ethical problems, because the only ready source of stem cells for this purpose has been from human embryo tissue.


The 'magic' property of stem cells is that, because all cells in the body stem from this type of cell, they can be manipulated into becoming and replacing any kind of tissue... and now a team, led by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University, has managed to turn fibroblasts, common cells in our skins, back into their embryonic state so that the cells then behave like stem cells! The above image belongs to The New York Times.

This early research has so far been conducted with skin samples from mice, but there is no reason why this technique cannot be adapted to human cells of this type. Of course, there will need to be much more refinement and development before this technique could be tested safely in human subjects. However, this progress should help to speed up stem cell research and make it much more acceptable to those who have previously objected on moral grounds...

read more here:

bbc science news

and here:

Science Daily report

Wisdom From The Yeast

Recent research has found that yeast cells have two systems in place that seem to ‘program’ their lifespan or mortality ‘clock’. These latest findings, from research conducted by Vladimir Titorenko and his team at Concordia University in Montreal, show that cells with higher level of certain types of lipids (fats) die younger than those with less fats, and that the mitochondria in ‘leaner’ cells are more efficient ‘powerhouses’ for their cell and better able to cope with stress and trauma. Yeast given a calorie-restricted diet were healthier for longer than their well-fed counterparts.

Keeping carbohydrates, sugars and fats low in the diets of more complex organisms, such as worms, fruit flies, mice, rats and dogs, has resulted in measurably increased lifespans and levels of well-being. This does indicate that the beneficial effects work across species, from single celled organisms, simple invertebrates, right up to complex mammals…


This is yet more evidence to back up the work of pioneering life extentionist Roy Walford (image above, (C) 1999, Roy L Walford Living Trust) who advocated “under-nutrition without mal-nutrition" as one of the steps we can take to increase the duration of healthy life.

Well they say, “Live’n’learn,” eh?
The more we live the more we can learn.

Learn more about living long here:

Aging Gets With The Program from ‘Science News’

We Will Be Able To Live To 1,000 by Dr Aubrey de Grey, University of Cambridge

Roy Walford Wikipedia Entry and Roy Walford’s Website